No matter what you think of his politics, U.S. presidential cantidate Barack Obama has a pretty incredible marketing and design machine behind him. One strong example of this is his “O” logo. Simple, attractive, symbolic, it’s undeniably an effective logo.

Another aspect of the Obama campaign that is attractive to a lot of American’s is the grass-roots, everybody can be involved attitude that they’ve been trying quite successfully to convey. In honor of that attitude, and just in time for the Democratic Convention, I thought I would show some really helpful Illustrator techniques by making the Obama logo. In this tutorial, we’ll be going over the Pathfinder, Envelope Warps, Opacity Masks, and Gradient Meshes. And we’ll use a drop shadow!

What’s that? You don’t think we can do it? I have three words for you my friend.

Yes. We. Can.

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This is the second step in my series of tutorial, the first being Easy Keyboard Controls and Game Design. In this tutorial I will be building on what we already have, adding asteroids and the ability to crash into them.
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In this tutorial I will be going over some of the basic elements to making a game in Flash. This being the first in a short series of tutorials on the subject, I will cover the main game loop and keyboard controls.
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I have another simple but neat, little tutorial here on Flash CS3 filters. This time I’m not using Tweens at all. Our effect is going to use the MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE event to create the illusion of a light source coming from our cursor.

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Above is a little example menu I made for a fake game called “Top Secret.” Don’t expect a game to start when you click on the Play button. Instead, when you click a button you will get a little menu to change the rollover effects of said button.

What I’m going to be talking about for the next… however long you read this, is how to recreate these cool effects for your own projects. Hopefully you will come up with some better ideas for using filters then just rollover effects.
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For any dynamic Flash project, XML will be a powerful tool. One of the most common examples (and one of the simplest) is a picture gallery like the one I have here:

Images came from http://www.stockvault.net/

I will be talking about how to use Flash and XML to make a simple, yet superfly, gallery.
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