Metropolitan Identity Design
I know these are not entirely new, but I just came across the visual identities of two cities who have, within about the last two years, rebranded themselves with new logos.
Who knew cities could have logos, let alone entire visual identity systems, officially commissioned and sanctioned by municipal authorities?
It makes sense, when you think about it: cities have distinct and unique personalities/souls, which in a marketing context is essentially a city's brand. Cities therefore must manage how they are perceived by their own citizens, commuters, tourists and visitors, and of course, other cities. Witness the great rivalries between the cities of the world: New York and Boston over baseball; London and Paris, recently over the 2012 Olympics and, historically over being international financial centers, among other things.
We've all seen identities for cities when they are in the running for an Olympic bid, and of course there are more traditional visual identifiers like official city seals or coat of arms.
But there's no hard and fast rule to a city having a logo of its own, even without the specter of hosting the next summer Olympics around the corner, so, why not?
And whaddya know? Both Melbourne, Australia and Belfast, Northern Ireland have done exactly that, with Belfast even going so far as commissioning a custom typeface called "Moment".
It's certainly inspiring to see such a thing happening, and of course as a designer, I certainly wouldn't be against it if this became more of a trend around the world.
It almost makes me wanna whip out Illustrator and start bangin' out some identities for the City of Boston. Boston, I love your official city seal,
AS3 Gotcha #4: Calling Event Handlers From Other Places (dispatchEvent)
So, here's a scenario:
You've got two buttons, and both should do the exact same thing — but they're located in different places; in fact, one of them could even be in a different SWF. What to do?
You've got a button assigned to do something when it's clicked. Let's say it triggers some complex ActionScript-driven animation. You want the exact some functionality (the complex animation) to be triggered from somewhere else in your Flash movie as well.
Well, in AS2 it was relatively simple:
buttonOne.onRelease = function() {
doSomething();
doSomeOtherStuff();
doSomeMoreStuff();
//...and lots of more other stuff
//that we won't re-type here
//but you get the pic
}
...and elsewhere in the movie:
buttonTwo.onRelease = function() {
this._parent.the_rest_of_the_path.buttonOne.onRelease();
}
Essentially, you'd just call buttonOne's onRelease handler from within buttonTwo (since buttonOne's handler was essentially a self-contained function). And you'd be done.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in AS3. (You can thank event listeners for that.)
Long story short, the new way to do that in AS3 would be with dispatchEvent(). Like so:
buttonOne.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickButtonOne);
function clickButtonOne (e) {
trace("button one was clicked")
}
...and elsewhere in the movie:
buttonTwo.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickButtonTwo);
function clickButtonTwo (e) {
Object(this.parent).the_rest_of_the_path.buttonOne.dispatchEvent(
new MouseEvent(MouseEvent.CLICK)
);
}
Now why would you ever want to do something like this? Well, my friend. Consider the following:
You're lazy. You have technology at your fingertips. There has to be a better way, right?
If you used the copy and paste method, and you ever needed to change anything to
closeButtonOne's onRelease handler, you would have to manually updatecloseButonTwo's handler as well. How genuinely lo-tech....not to mention things could really start to get messy when the two buttons are in totally different places in your Flash file, if means all of your target paths would have to be re-written to suit each individual MovieClip.
[ EDIT: October 17, 2009 ] Updated code example according to Banned App's suggestion.
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