shawn.blais

Shawn has worked as programmer and product designer for over 20 years, shipping several games on Steam and Playstation and dozens of apps on mobile. He has extensive programming experience with Dart, C#, ActionScript, SQL, PHP and Javascript and a deep proficiency with motion graphics and UX design. Shawn is currently the Technical Director for gskinner.

@tree_fortress

Flokk – How we built a Desktop App Using Flutter

Earlier this year Google and Ubuntu approached us with an open brief, to try and create a full-scale desktop application for Linux, macOS, Web, and Windows. The result was Flokk, which we released (and open-sourced) back in July.

In this post, we’re going to dive into some of the challenges we faced, the discoveries we made, and desktop-specific features that we added.

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A Dive Into the CAMP Site Assets

The site we made for the 2019 CAMP Festival for creatives recently won an Applied Arts award for Community Promotional Design! To celebrate, we looked back at some of the assets that went into the site experience.

The Site

The site took visitors on a mini-journey through a Canadian-inspired landscape. This is the breakdown of the assets for the site header rendered in Blender.
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Cinema 4D Lite vs Blender

I’ve been recently learning Cinema 4D Lite in my professional development time at gskinner and comparing it to Blender 2.8. After having spent time in both pieces of software, I wanted to share the pros and cons of using these 3D tools. So here is what I know you’ve all been waiting for: the C4D Lite vs. Blender Battle of 2020!

Battle of the Software!

Rotating bottle of hot sauce made in Cinema 4D Lite
Rotating bottle of hot sauce made in Blender

I couldn’t think of a better way to test two 3D packages than with a hot sauce bottle showdown. Using both C4D Lite and Blender, I tried to create the same scene to showcase the abilities of both.

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Flutter: The new ‘animations’ package explained

The Flutter team recently dropped a great new transitions package, based on the new Material 2 design spec, the somewhat ambiguously-named: animations package.

SharedAxis Example

They are super cool to look at and appear to be highly performant. The only issue? The examples they’ve provided with the package are pretty hard to follow (coming in at close to 1500 lines!) and there’s no code snippets at all in the README.

But fear not! This package is actually extremely simple to use once you clear away the noise, and can see how it works.

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Creating Efficient Designer and Developer Collaboration

Flutter Vignettes Showreel
Flutter Vignettes Showreel 2019. Click here to see a full video

It’s already been 2 months since our team finished the Flutter Vignette project and gave a talk at Flutter Interact ’19. Throughout the project, we were able to maintain a healthy designer-developer relationship, which was the key to the successful completion of the project. I want to share 5 things that helped us build an effective and efficient collaboration between designers and developers.

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