Technology – Confidant Communications Blog

Celebrating 15 Years: A Retrospective of Confidant Communications

Confidant Communications has been operating for 15 years now, so I compiled some snapshots from each year since 2009. Enjoy!

2009 Hands On Website

Hands On was a place where kids from the streets could find shelter and have fun. Working with the “shipping box” aesthetic for various parts of the design was a lot of fun, and it let us feature images drawn by the kids who went there!

2009 Treacherous Book Design

This was a highlight for Confidant because it won a Saskatchewan Premier’s Award in the graphic design category. Never mind there was just one other competitor in the category. We don’t talk about that.

2010 ThinkSask.com

It was so much fun to do this! The site started as a Flash application (you remember Flash, don’t you?) and then was converted using the Haxe language. At the time Haxe was a new tool in our box but it worked exceedingly well for this project. Animation for HTML5 required exporting individual frames from Flash and then assembling them into sprite sheets with an automated process.

2011 WaposBay.com

A thrilling project both for technical and aesthetic reasons, the Wapos Bay site was its own world of stop-motion characters from the Canadian TV show. It required bringing together many different transparent videos which would play at random and/or interact with the user input. I built an application that managed all the special conditions on what animations were allowed to play and when. Careful attention had to be paid to smart asset loading because bandwidth in 2011 was much more limited than it is today.

2012 Bring Niko Home

This was a personal project for raising funds as our family planned to adopt our son from overseas. Allan recorded a collection of songs and offered them for free download in hopes that people would give money towards our goal. The songs are still available at the time of this writing. Please, only laugh at the funny ones!

2013 Shelterbelt Design Tool

If you ever wondered how many trees you needed to plant in a half mile row, this was the application for you! Once again it was very satisfying to bring together different code toolkits and unite them using the Haxe language. Accessibility was an essential feature and it was necessary to use the Canada government’s WET-BOEW framework, sprinkled with some JQuery and OpenLayers for the maps. The whole tool could be used solely with keyboard entry if the user needed.

2013 Ajax & Me

We did design, editing and layout for this interesting youth-market book. We convinced the publisher that having illustrations for each chapter would make it more appealing, and Allan got his first opportunity to be a professional illustrator!

2014 Lentil Hunter Map

An interactive map that displays videos! We compiled both Flash and HTML5/Javascript from the same Haxe code so that we could have maximum compatibility.

2015 X-110 Protein Snacks

The client needed assistance in both naming their product and creating a branding program to include packaging, display, print, and web. We did product photography and even hand-built display modules as required.

2016 SAS Design Standards Guide

The Saskatchewan Archaeological Society had a new logo they produced, and needed some guidance on how to best use it. We produced this document for their internal use.

2017 Play Poster and Elevators Awards Colouring Book

Pro bono projects are always a fun opportunity to push the creative limits a bit! In other news, I was the villain in the play and got to display my panic attack skills!

The Graphic Designers of Canada put together a colouring book themed awards show that year. This was my contribution.

2018 GDC Christmas Cards

The Saskatchewan North chapter of the Graphic Designers of Canada (now DesCan) and their generous sponsors Novatex produced a series of Christmas cards. I jumped at the chance to do some screen printing design again, since it was a long time since I worked as a screen print designer and printer in 1995 and 1996.

2019 RTA Kitchen Design Tool

This was a fantastic opportunity to expand Confidant services into the realm of 3D visualization and full-stack application development. Using Haxe, OpenFL, FeathersUI, Away3D and our own Glory Framework. Behind the scenes we leverage PHP, Docker, HashLink and Node.js.

2020 Fahselt Overhead Door Logo Clean-up

I did a lot of technical work that year, so it’s always nice to get some design work. Don’t crowd-source your logos, folks! Pain! Suffering!

2021 Amity Trust Website

Amity had an attractive new branding program. After advising on some letter-spacing issues in their logo I designed their new Joomla! website to complement their new design and work tightly with their page builder component.

2022 Prairie Kettle Corn

This was one of those designs where I did something that was sort of good but I revisited it after a couple days and made it way better.

2023 Augmented Reality

This was the year Confidant did our first launch into augmented reality, adding it to the RTA Kitchen Design Tool.

2024 Three.js and a big thing for Joomla!

That brings us to today. My efforts this year have been towards building more 3D graphic technology, this time using Three.js because of its native support for augmented reality. I also started a big top-secret side project for Joomla! Watch this space for more details on that!

Thanks for reading, we look forward to what the future holds!

Mobile First?

One of the recent catch phrases in web development these days is “Mobile First”. The idea behind it is that since mobile now comprises the majority of web traffic, that’s what should get our most attention.

To many web designers, mobile first means “do a mobile layout first and then worry about the desktop experience later.” As a result, these designers give up the freedom that having a blank canvas affords. In other words, their designs look overly simplistic when viewed on a large device.

Should it take many screens of scrolling to find the information I need?

We fought for this

I started building websites professionally in 1996, when dial-up internet was the norm, and layouts were done using HTML tables. Once a page size exceeded 200KB, it was considered too large. We designed for 640 pixel wide screens at first, and if you happened to have 800 pixels on your CRT monitor you learned to live with condensed layouts.

Imagine my delight when CSS allowed designers to really work with the screen size instead of against it. Soon you could use fancy graphic backgrounds, custom graphic buttons, even rollover effects which didn’t require JavaScript programming.

Along the way bandwidth steadily increased. Nowadays a single homepage can easily exceed 10 MB and nobody complains. In the right hands, this can result in very beautiful experiences on the web.

The better way: User First

Websites are for people, not devices. If you remember that, a lot of the building blocks become easier to craft:

User interface isn’t just simple—it should be always organised to take advantage of the space available so the user can get more done, quicker.
Use less data if you can provide a comparable user experience. Compress your scripts. Lazy load your images. Choose the right image formats. Use an adaptive image compressor on your server to serve smaller images to mobile users.
Make it pretty and then simplify for mobile. People simply like to see graphics and the simple fact is that larger screens allow for more. Make sure it’s appropriate, but let your creative muscle get some exercise.

Web design is a craft, and it is communication. Embrace your end user and you will enjoy your job, and your users will enjoy what you produce.

My concerns about artificial intelligence and virtual reality

Today I wrote the following letter to two members of Canadian Parliament:

Dear Ms Benson and Mr Bains,

I am a graphic designer and internet developer in the constituency of Ms Benson. As such, I tend to keep informed about technological advances. I am writing to you because I am becoming increasingly concerned that recent advances in virtual reality and artificial intelligence will soon become extremely invasive of our privacy unless we proactively create legislation to combat it.

Can you imagine if a company such as Facebook knew your every thought? This sounds alarmist, but hear me out. That company is already a heavy proponent of virtual reality:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/11/mark-zuckerberg-we-want-to-get-1-billion-people-in-virtual-reality/

What if they enhance their VR technology with eye tracking software, so that they can collect data on absolutely everything you look at with interest? When they find out that you like green socks better than blue ones, you can bet there will be custom advertising based on what caught your eye. People’s sexual preferences will certainly not be exempt from this data collection either.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/06/eye-tracking-is-virtual-realitys-next-frontier/

What if they began to analyze your body language to add to their data—tracking your every response as you watch a video? Facebook now owns a gesture-tracking technology, so they can do that too.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/oculus-facebook-virtual-reality-firm-buys-gesture-recognition-firm-pebbles-10394205.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4672508/New-AI-read-body-language-real-time.html

Last but not least, technology is now able to create virtual characters who look and sound like real people. Imagine how persuasive a real-time digital character could be if they knew all your interests, responded instantly to your body language, and even modified their own appearance to be more attractive to you?
https://twitter.com/verge/status/912403648356978688

Would not companies pay for such things in order that you would buy their products or submit to their agenda? Would not some politicians leverage such technology in order to sway your vote? These things are coming, and we need legislation to stop the abuse before it starts. Companies like Facebook already take heavy advantage of human psychology in crafting how their mobile applications work—using things such as eye tracking and body language will become just another tool in their toolbox.

I would recommend legislation against collection of eye tracking and body language data outright. This is something that people should not have to think about while using their computer. I would also recommend legislation disallowing advertising which is instantly customised in response to live user reaction. This would be especially inappropriate in politics. Savvy companies might allow virtual characters in games to be manipulated by digital advertisers—this also should be prevented.

Honourable Members, I know you keep busy with many things. I really hope you could also help out with this very important issue.
Thank you for your service to our country.

Sincerely,
Allan Dowdeswell

UPDATE:

I received a response from Ms. Benson; not sure yet whether my ideas will proceed further. I also recently found this video about research at Dolby, which validates my concerns: