Designing and coding

Prompted by his recent work for BMW, I've been following up on what happened to Joshua Davis (as opposed to Josh Davis) since the days when surfing praystation was one of the best skives to be found online.

It's easy to dismiss Davis, his personal projects and his work for Kioken as yesterday's news. Flash is out of fashion. And because of that it's easy to forget what a pioneer Davis was and is. He not only designs, he codes his ActionScript too. I suspect he doesn't see a distinction between the two, but I guess that's the point I fumbling towards making. He's the of Jack Bauer of interactive design.

And even back in the bubble days, he was sharing his knowledge in a generous, open source kind of way via his site and his many speaking engagements.

Oh yeah, he's starting a blog. It's still more like the promise of a blog, but it already includes some posts on past work. I especially like his explanation of L-systems. It's interesting that he feels slightly uncomfortable keeping a blog, explaining that he's not naturally a writer. But looking at the praystation archive from 2000, that's exactly what he was doing back then. Keeping a visual blog of his work-in-progress and sharing the code with anyone who was interested.