flomm dot us: making a screwy website + game finally released

A PERSONAL HISTÓRY oF FLOMM so far     PART 8 of 10 

“Have any of you ever ac­tu­al­ly read the la­bel on Doc Bronner’s 18-in‑1 soap? That is some bonkers shit go­ing on there.”
—Emi­ly Duchaine

“If your web­site looks like a web­site, you’ve got a prob­lem.”
—Roger Black, smart guy, 1999
 

There’s this thing I sort of be­lieve.

And it flies in the face of every­thing I know about user ex­pe­ri­ence (UX) and user in­ter­faces (UI)s. I’ll get to it in a minute.

It’s sort of the op­po­site of how web­sites we have NOW were the re­sult of thir­ty years of evo­lu­tion from Amer­i­ca On­line thru the Dot Com Bust – with two of the ma­jor sur­vivors be­ing Ama­zon and Ebay.

And if you look at Ama­zon and Ebay, the for­mat – head­er, foot­er with ver­ti­cal con­tent squeezed in be­tween – their lay­out be­came the for­mat­ting ba­sics.
 

 

On the World Wide Web, we nev­er went with hor­i­zon­tal scrolling cause ear­ly on it took longer to load.

And when I built my first hor­i­zon­tal scrolling web­site in protest, I dis­cov­ered Mi­crosoft Ex­plor­er cut off any­thing that went side­ways. (Mi­crosoft Word also cuts off any weird tall ascenders/descenders in my fonts).

Then Google com­ing up with an awe­some search al­go­rithm end­ed up mak­ing all of us slaves to key­words di­rect­ly in HTML text #TAGS #TAGS #TAGS #TAGS #TAGS sort of fin­ished off How Things Should Look.

Head­er, nav, foot­er with ver­ti­cal con­tent squeezed in be­tween. It’s now wat we ex­pect, or we do that ve­nial sin of en­gag­ing with a web­site: We leave.

BUT. We have a screen in front of us and us­ing HTML (and CSS) it is pos­si­ble to de­sign a web­site any damn way we want.

But we don’t.

Cause of re­ten­tion.

If your web­site doesn’t have every­thing you need in a quick to click menu, you’re fucked. And if it’s a three line ham­burg­er menu, well, that de­bate on rages on.

O, and go cap­ture their email. Mor emails you have, mor valid you are.
 

“I’ve looked at your val­ue as a site and it sucks.”
—a mediocre pho­tog­ra­ph­er told me
 

If you re­al­ly want you can buy num­bers, but that’s not wat FLOMM is about.

It’s an art project at this point and I’d rather en­gage with a few real peo­ple than thou­sands who just fol­low us cause it’s the cool thing to do. (I may deny I said this in the fu­ture, but who knos?)

So if They can’t fig­ure it out, They Will Leave. Which is where we are to­day. Let’s make a web­site that isn’t easy to fig­ure out.
 

 

Be­cause that was the goal of the DADAists: Make every­one fed up so they will leave.

Self-de­feat­ing art move­ment web­site? Okay then.
 

“Keep go­ing in this di­rec­tion and you’ll suf­fer the same fate as your in­spi­ra­tion.”
—Louis Her­nan­dez, talk­ing about some­thing else
 

i wan­na break the in­ter­net
So a messed up web­site for FLOMM is a giv­en, be­cause when was the last time you were at a web­site? I mean, isn’t all in­ter­ac­tion on so­cial me­dia at this point, not web me­dia??

And I had a few in­spi­ra­tions for FLOMM web­site stuffs:

Once, AIGA Los An­ge­les had a web­site where ALL the im­ages that loaded on the home page ran­dom­ly ap­peared with the vi­su­al work of dif­fer­ent graph­ic de­sign­ers as mem­bers. As a re­sult, when­ev­er one would hit their site, you’d get the same UI – but a to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent skin/UX. AND THIS WAS FUN.

The Art Di­rec­tors Club of Hous­ton had this hand­made web­site once with Pan­tone Chips on their home­page and scrib­bled let­ter­ing that said, These are our col­ors, you can’t use them. And each link I clicked on led to a page that looked to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from the oth­er page I clicked on. Like, the web­site was to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent on each page.

These are two graph­ic de­sign web­sites about groups that brand­ing ex­perts join – and they threw the Laws of Brand­ing to the curb. And shit, I want to do that too.
 

 

Be­cause güd brand­ing can be a com­plex ex­pe­ri­ence BUILT on style alone. And I was work­ing at a time (the 1990s) where brand­ing could work har­mo­nious­ly if the de­sign­er just got the ‘look’ of things work­ing con­sis­tent­ly – and not every­thing al­ways needs to be built around just a killer logo (which is a myth).

So with FLOMM I want­ed to do just this + de­con­struct things a bit, be­cause of DADAism. Mak­ing all this a crazy chal­lenge be­cause hey, why not?

Prob­lem tho: I’m not a web pro­gram­mer.

But as a teacher, I am sur­round­ed by web pro­gram­mers – be­cause web de­sign is FAR mor in de­mand than print graph­ic de­sign (which is sort of why NOW I kno just enough about HTML to be dan­ger­ous.)

So, who wants to make the FLOMM! web­site with me? Any tak­ers?
 

“Stay afraid, but do it any­way. What’s im­por­tant is the ac­tion. You don’t have to wait to be con­fi­dent. Just do it and even­tu­al­ly the con­fi­dence will fol­low.”
—Car­rie Fish­er

eye rolling and se­nior projects
At my (now closed) school, Graph­ic and Web De­sign ma­jors need­ed to come up with and pitch a Se­nior Project in or­der to grad­u­ate.

And my view of this process was from out­side, I was not the pro­fes­sor in charge of any of this. At the time, I had just about all of them in my be­gin­ning cours­es – and I was kind of a con­sult­ing coach when it came to Se­nior Projects.
 

And my view was taint­ed cause I kept run­ning into stu­dents who were just – “oh GOD­DDDDD, I don’t KNOWWWWW what I want to DOOOOOOO.”

Me: “Well, wat are your in­ter­ests?”

“I don’t KNOWWWWW I just want to GRAD­DDDDDY­OU­U­U­U­ATTTTTT­TEEE.”
 

I re­mem­ber sit­ting there once with 2 bril­liant stu­dents for, like, 30 min­utes un­til their reg­u­lar pro­fes­sor shows up and I was at­tempt­ing to find out ANY­THING AT ALL that might in­ter­est these two into some­thing that might – oh – FUCK­ING WOW an EM­PLOY­ER at a DE­SIGN STU­DIO some­where where they’d end up do­ing wat they LOVE – which is sup­posed to be DE­SIGN­ING THINGS.

Be­cause that’s wat their de­grees would be in.
 

“I re­al­ly wish the Graph­ic De­sign stu­dents weren’t so mis­er­able. I thought graph­ic de­sign­ers are sup­posed to LOVE de­sign­ing things.”
—Bill, again
 

So did I.

And this led to a talk I give in the very ear­ly cours­es – that stu­dents aren’t quite ready for yet but I hope it just hov­ers in the lat­er­al pos­te­ri­or pari­etal cor­tex for a few years:

“There are SHIT Graph­ic De­sign jobs and there are AWE­SOME Graph­ic De­sign jobs. Wat you put in your port­fo­lio will help de­ter­mine which sort of job you will get.”

Like, look at one of my for­mer stu­dents: The Real Tim Kim.

He fuck­ing loves de­sign­ing things and he de­signs for fuck­ing Miche­lin-lev­el restau­ra­teurs. And I’m pret­ty sure he loves wat he’s work­ing on to­day. ANNND, I wan­na have lunch with him.

So I kept see­ing stu­dents tank­ing their own Se­nior Projects and end­ing up in SHIT jobs.

BUT I found the ex­cep­tion to the rule. I ran into Aman­da on the stairs, I was head­ing down, she was head­ing up and she said:
 

“I’m build­ing the FLOMM web­site.”

And I couldn’t get out more than a “But …”

“I’m build­ing it … all of it.”

“But …”

“Do­ing the de­sign too.”

There was a long pause, be­cause I ac­tu­al­ly kno bet­ter than to ar­gue with a gift like this.

“Okay then.”
 

dif­fi­cult web­site, take one
I was just go­ing to grab some sort of CMS tem­plate and throw info on there and men­tion the game and a few things – but Aman­da Burn­ham had se­lect­ed the FLOMM web­site as her Se­nior Project and she knew wat she want­ed to do.

All my talk about how cool it is to do The Hard Things got to her. And it’s awe­some when that hap­pens.

And she was de­ter­mined to push the en­ve­lope – be­yond wat en­velopes do.

So there were a few things we de­cid­ed on: Word­Press en­vi­ron­ment, so the site can be up­dat­ed eas­i­ly over time – we talked about the site not need­ing a ma­jor up­grade over time, where ma­jor re­builds can be done by just mov­ing things around. Word­Press can do this and I’m thank­ful we went in this di­rec­tion.

And I want­ed dif­fer­ent lay­outs for every page. With as many dif­fer­ent fonts as pos­si­ble – as if a group of DADA-think­ing artists sat down and de­cid­ed to make a web­site out of pa­per, a print­ing press and a few box­es of ran­dom met­al type. In 1923.

The Art Di­rec­tors Club of Hous­ton site – mor than a dozen years lat­er – may not be saved at Archive.org, but was still stuck in my head.
 

 

In­spi­ra­tion for the site de­sign would be sim­i­lar to the game: The print­ed out­put of the DADAists, Fu­tur­ists, Con­struc­tivists, the Bauhaus and any­thing and every­thing that re­lates to those cat­e­gories.

Be­cause I have books to ref­er­ence! And our school had a killer li­brary with books I couldn’t af­ford but rec­om­mend­ed they have in the stacks. Hah!

And to­day, a lot of these orig­i­nal Mod­ern pieces can be found in PDF form at the Mono­skop web­site, or, of course, you can see the orig­i­nal orig­i­nals at Let­ter­form Archive in San Fran­cis­co.
 

dif­fi­cult web­site, take two
This col­lab­o­ra­tion took three whole quar­ters and two Se­nior Project class­es. And I did step in as co-de­sign­er along the way; be­cause this was a CRAZY DIF­FI­CULT un­der­tak­ing.

 

 

And from see­ing how the FLOMM game was de­vel­oped, Aman­da set up every­thing where it could change on the fly be­cause I have ran­dom idea in the show­er and want to in­clude it.

Typ­i­cal web de­vel­op­ment doesn’t work that way – but it did lead to some un­usu­al sec­tions and com­pro­mis­es. Our main nav be­came a black rec­tan­gle and Aman­da pulled the heavy lines from my site map and used em di­rect­ly as point­ers:

 

 

tung time!
Some­where along the way, we de­cid­ed we need­ed an on-site blog – in ad­di­tion to our Tum­blr pres­ence.

The blog was sim­ply set up for FLOMM news and PR bull­shit – but the idea of DER TUNG with a Plakat­stil-style news­pa­per mast­head – us­ing type from the leg­endary Michael Doret – and a tongue, that was a show­er thought.

 

 

So was turn­ing DER TUNG into a rein­car­na­tion of a week­ly ’zine I edit­ed in col­lege: THE MON­DAY MORN­ING BLUES. Free, un­cen­sored speech – from opin­ion to fic­tion to po­et­ry to comics was our thing. To make, a hand­ful of us used to use an old Ap­ple IIe with a ba­sic word pro­cess­ing pro­gram hooked up to an inky type­writer-like dot ma­trix print­er for our text. Then art was pho­to­copied to fit (it ac­tu­al­ly was hard to find a copi­er that al­lowed en­large and re­duc­tion at the time), paste-up was done by hand (wax and x‑Acto knives!), we used to print us­ing cheap pa­per plates on a bare­ly func­tion­ing A.B. Dick off­set press, fold and hand col­late, then dis­trib­ute about 3,500 copies every Mon­day to stu­dents at the Col­lege of San Ma­teo.

The MMB was a suc­cess­ful con­cept at the time – luck­i­ly we didn’t re­cruit too many psy­cho writ­ers, but once word got out ‘we’d print any­thing,’ by my third year, con­tent just came pour­ing in.

Did over 100 is­sues while I was at the school (found my fi­nal edition’s cov­er here, I post­ed it be­low. The Tow­er Records-em­ployed il­lus­tra­tor went on to di­rect movies or some­thing.)

 

Maybe with DER TUNG, my night­mares about paste up/ printing/ collating/ dis­tri­b­u­tion might fi­nal­ly stop.
 

“Re­mem­ber the MMB? Well, it’s tak­en me over 30 years and my own per­son­al for­tune but I’ve recre­at­ed it as an on­line blog called DER TUNG.”
—Me to Lysa, one of my writ­ers over 30 years ago

“Haaa­haaah. That’s nice, Steve.”
—Lysa, cuts me off and ap­plies for AARP
 

DER TUNG start­ed Oc­to­ber 2014 and the first posts were pret­ty much me blog­ging my Bauhaus course – then I opened it up to writ­ers and artists I knew and it veered into wat it is to­day:

FLOMM Lit­téraire Blog post­ing FLOM­MIST writ­ings from every­where.
 

 

Else­where, the site’s orig­i­nal ABOUT in­tro was dif­fi­cult to build – and I end­ed up over­haul­ing it a cou­ple times on my own (af­ter we moved on be­yond the game), leav­ing the code in­tact and up­dat­ing the im­agery.

 

 

The LEARN sec­tion con­tains the Bib­li­og­ra­phy for my game re­search, a page of out­side links (which I haven’t up­dat­ed in years, but Aman­da fig­ured out how to zig zag the type), a sar­cas­tic ‘stu­dent-writ­ten’ es­say (which at one point, some­one who re­viewed the game – in an­oth­er lan­guage – took at face val­ue), and some­thing I’ve al­ways loved: Our His­toric Mus­es of FLOMM page.
 

“No­body nor­mal ever ac­com­plished any­thing great.”
—Bwargh von Mod­nar
 

Tis true. Aman­da came up with the Mus­es for­mat – based on the de­sign work of El Lis­sitzky – with each en­try pro­vid­ing not just bi­o­graph­ic in­for­ma­tion and a quote, but links to on­line sources to re­search these lu­mi­nar­ies.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, ‘un­la­beled’ il­lus­tra­tions ran­dom­ly be­tween the list­ings – just click on them if you want to kno who they are. I re­cruit­ed il­lus­tra­tor David Pow­ers to help me sketch out a bunch and I’m still not sure David ever re­al­ly got wat we were try­ing to do here. Make the page in­ter­ac­tive. So you know, some­one can play with the damn thing.

All of the artists, de­sign­ers and per­form­ers on the Mus­es page ac­com­plished things that mo­ti­vate me to cre­ate; maybe they can in­spire you too.
 

“From han­dlet­ter­ing to his­tor­i­cal fonts, ty­pog­ra­phy is the back­bone of FLOMM.”
—in­tro, FLOMM Fonts page
 

Ty­pog­ra­phy plays an im­por­tant role in FLOMM.

And I used a LOT of it in the game (as im­ages) AND the web­site.

So much we sort of broke Adobe Type­kit be­fore we even launched our site. Be­cause, as I was told by some­one at Adobe, “Nor­mal peo­ple don’t make web­sites like this.” And I saw a cou­ple years lat­er, goofy sites like FLOMM.us aren’t sup­port­ed in their EULA.

The short end of all of it is: If I want a pile of fonts as HTML at the site, I have to lim­it things to just a hand­ful. Or pages will take DAYS to load or some­thing.

So we set­tled on some nice ba­sics: James Todd’s serif Garvis, Mark Simonson’s Prox­i­ma Nova, Ste­fan Hattenbach’s Lu­mi­nance, Matts Grif­fin and Braun’s Fat­boy re­vival of George Nesbitt’s 1828 Ul­tra Wide Egypt­ian, and my own Nie­der­mann Grotesk.

Then we added the beau­ti­ful and quick load­ing (nü at the time) Google fonts of Eben Sorkin be­cause I met Eben in San Fran­cis­co (at the TYPO Con­fer­ence) and we end­ed up go­ing for a long walk thru the San Fran­cis­co Mis­sion look­ing for a place he knew of that sells in­cred­i­ble Saf­fron Ice Cream.

He told me about his type con­tract with Google and how he was mak­ing their web­fonts col­lec­tion awe­some (in 2014 it wasn’t awe­some, it kin­da sucked). And in the years since, I’ve passed on his care­ful­ly craft­ed + cu­rat­ed col­lec­tion any­time I found my­self teach­ing Ty­pog­ra­phy for the Web.
 

 

Every­thing else list­ed on the Fonts page we sort of shoe­horned in. Sor­ta. And just for the chal­lenge, most of the rec­tan­gle ‘spec­i­mens’ on this page were de­signed when I had noth­ing to do for about 2 hours.

Yes, I can de­sign quick­ly if I wan­na.
 

“Fash­ion is the ar­mor to sur­vive the re­al­i­ty of every­day life.”
—pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bill Cun­ning­ham
 

fash­ion for­ward flomm
My plan was to re­lease a bunch of FLOMM mer­chan­dise to help pay for wat we’ve been do­ing – in ad­di­tion to any in­come from the game it­self.

I de­cid­ed to use Zaz­zle for ful­fill­ment. Be­cause their prints, mugs and post­cards come out BEAU­TI­FUL.
 

 

And be­cause they’re ‘on de­mand’ made one-at-a-time print­ing, I don’t have a bunch of prod­uct ly­ing around, there’s no pre-or­der­ing costs, there’s some­thing a bit eco-friend­ly about this struc­ture, you can pick your own shirts and colours AND if there’s only a few made, you can be the only one on your block sport­ing FLOMM merch!
 

 

 

I want­ed to do a se­ries of tees, but­tons and stick­ers with all the FLOMM char­ac­ters on them – and be­cause I’d promised Rik­ki More­house a fash­ion shoot years ear­li­er for some­thing else that nev­er hap­pened – we set up with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Kay­lah Ham­mer and VFX artist Kevin Har­baugh AND a bunch of slides of the lo­cal­ly icon­ic Sacra­men­to Wa­ter Tow­er + elec­tric­i­ty grid – we booked our­selves into a pho­to stu­dio and start­ed shoot­ing away.

For twen­ty min­utes. Be­cause Se­cu­ri­ty showed up and threw us out of the build­ing.

Be­cause some­how none of us had the right per­mis­sions to be there. Tho the re­sults of our 20 minute shoot are on our MERCH page.
 

 

And Rik­ki – who would lat­er give up graph­ic de­sign and join the cir­cus and re­al­ly ex­pand the de­f­i­n­i­tion of who re­al­ly is a FLOM­MIST in our lit­tle group here – end­ed up hav­ing her body parts float­ing around the FLOMM game.
 

 

Be­cause of mus­es Raoul Haus­mann + Han­nah Höch. And be­cause of Karel Teige.
 

site launched, kin­da done?
Any­one whose de­vel­oped a web­site knos it’s nev­er ac­tu­al­ly done.

And yeah, that’s wat ac­tu­al­ly works here – in our 5th year since go­ing live, we do lit­tle up­dates to and fro + the Word­Press CMS keep it flow­ing.

Aman­da con­tin­ued work­ing on the site un­til her grad­u­a­tion – we launched with our un­fin­ished ex­per­i­ment – and we end­ed up with a HUGE  play now  link at the top of the main menu, right be­low the over 100 FLOMM lo­gos that load ran­dom­ly.
 

 

AND YOU CAN AC­TU­AL­LY SIGN our MAN­I­FESTO. We have a SIG­NA­TURE FIELD just to see if ANY­ONE is will­ing to sign – as an art project. We don’t col­lect any­thing ’cept a name. And we did get mor re­spons­es than we were ex­pect­ing.

Are peo­ple afraid to sign? Of course they are. And so it’s fun to see who ac­tu­al­ly is will­ing to do it.
 

 

Aman­da was snagged up al­most im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter leav­ing school and like, she’s fuck­ing cod­ing every­thing every­where be­cause SHE’S AMAZ­ING.

Like, imag­ine if ALL the grad­u­ates of our school ap­proached their Se­nior Projects like she did?

OMG, I’m such a fuck­ing dream­er!
 

Along the way, Kevin Har­baugh fin­ished up the game trail­er that was aban­doned by the oth­er guy 6 months ear­li­er.
 

 

Kevin fol­lowed my in­sane­ly pre­cise sto­ry­boards to the beat and we had the trail­er gen­er­at­ing hits. Only thing next to do was fin­ish, test and fix and then launch the game.

So we did.
 

“I blew up and it was beau­ti­ful.”
—Tere­sa Dela Cruz at Type­con

“FLOMM! is the videogame mod­ern artists wish they could’ve made.”
—Jes Joho at Killscreen

“Whether you are a re­spectable adult who craves Shoot ’em up video games but feels they are be­low his dig­ni­ty, or a dis­crim­i­nat­ing teenag­er that wants to stand out from his peers, Steve Mehallo’s FLomm: The Bat­tle For Mod­ern 1923, a new mo­bile game that uses the vi­su­al lan­guage of Mod­ern art and al­lows you to feel hip and cul­tured at the same time, is for you.”
—Misha Belet­sky at The Ty­pophiles
 

play flomm!
FLOMM! THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923 launched Jan­u­ary 2015 and was well re­viewed.

Al­li­son Meier at Hy­per­al­ler­gic, Chris Priest­man at Pock­etGamer, and the leg­endary graph­ic de­sign au­thor Steven Heller at Print wrote cool things, among oth­ers.
 

 

I heard from play­ers I knew (Art His­to­ry Pro­fes­sor Ken Ma­gri, above) and oth­ers ob­sessed with the game – want­i­ng to kno wat every­thing was and oth­ers fol­low­ing us on so­cial me­dia sent a com­ment or two – es­pe­cial­ly our tum­blr blog, which also got a vi­su­al cod­ing up­date from Aman­da.
 

 

Bill Mead, my boss at school, be­came the all time cham­pi­on play­er (that I knew of) – in that he found it re­lax­ing to just sit and BEAT TRA­DI­TION every chance he got (that’s Bill’s fin­gers, above).

Uni­ty Sys­tems even named a con­fer­ence room af­ter us. Like, that’s kin­da a cool thing.
 

 

I was also in­ter­viewed about FLOMM! on the lon­grun­ning Or­ange Lounge Ra­dio pod­cast – where I re­mem­ber be­ing asked wat the squig­gle ships are and wat the back­grounds are.
 

 

Hu­mans need a uni­verse to un­der­stand – a hun­dred years AF­TER ab­strac­tion be­came part of the art world, and Dis­ney ex­plained ab­strac­tion in the open­ing seg­ment of Fan­ta­sia (1940) – it’s still a hard geo­met­ric pill to swal­low.

As FLOMM! worked its way thru the gam­ing mar­ket, I found that there’s a lot of peo­ple who are still not ready to be fly­ing around in a DADAist en­vi­ron­ment us­ing an ab­stract shape as a ship.
 

 

And while this wasn’t ob­vi­ous at first – it’s some­thing I should have re­al­ized by the re­ac­tions I get in my his­to­ry class when I in­tro­duce Malevich’s rad­i­cal Black Square:

Peo­ple don’t un­der­stand Mod­ern Art. Peo­ple ac­tu­al­ly AVOID Mod­ern Art. Cause it’s too weird.

Hell, Art Deco is Mod­ern with ap­plied or­na­ment so large au­di­ences were able to get into it.
 

 

Even just re­spons­es to the float­ing EAR in my game: Every­one knows there was an artist – Van Gogh or some­thing – who cut off his ear. Which he sort of did, but a bit mor like ear gauges to­day, not his en­tire ear.

So com­mon knowl­edge of Mod­ern Art is: Some guy cut off his ear and Pi­cas­so was an ass­hole that put eyes in the wrong place and Warhol some­thing.

And while view­ing all this, I start­ed to change my teach­ing ap­proach to Mod­ern Art – I now de­scribe some­thing like Picasso’s Bulls (1945) as be­ing sim­i­lar to ap­ply­ing an In­sta­gram fil­ter to a foto of a Bull. So the fi­nal ab­strac­tion re­al­ly is a bull, but the ab­strac­tion can be seen as just a fil­ter:
 

 

Ab­strac­tion makes mor sense when I get into De Sti­jl. Be­cause Van Does­burg had his own charts to show a paint­ing-by-paint­ing process into ab­strac­tion and every­thing.
 

 

Like, Mod­ern Art is a club where if you get it, you’re in.

Like Fash­ion. Ani­me. Star Wars, Jazz, Punk Rock, just about every­thing with a fringe au­di­ence. And this would lead me to FLOMM’s next phase.

Be­cause the game it­self didn’t do so well.
 

“Nev­er got your email. But we would have loved to have giv­en you a write up about the game launch if we knew about it at the time. Maybe next ver­sion?”
—Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor of a Ma­jor Mag­a­zine
 

flomm goes boom!
Well, a few things hap­pened. Emails just ei­ther didn’t show up, were caught in fil­ters or were ig­nored. And I kno a LOT of peo­ple who edit de­sign mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, work in tele­vi­sion and film, like, every­where.

But me­dia re­ac­tion to the FLOMM! game was most­ly a ghost town. Tho I had so­cial me­dia as a back­up, right?

Well, in 2015, Face­book just im­ple­ment­ed their new al­go­rithm where if you LIKE a page, you no longer eas­i­ly see wat’s on that page.

The FLOMM game was re­leased in that lit­tle gap be­tween them do­ing that and of­fer­ing ad­ver­tis­ing – and we had, like, hun­dreds of LIKED ppl at this point. I re­mem­ber a ton of friends who sim­ply nev­er saw the text I sent about the game. Be­cause in the cor­ner, the check box nev­er coloured in (or wa­t­ev­er it would do in 2015). Face­book kept me away from SPAM­MING friends (as they saw it), so there was re­al­ly no way to get word out via Face­book, which I sort of count­ed on.

The way I de­scribe it sounds in­co­her­ent, and you know, that’s how I re­mem­ber it.

In­sta­gram was new (for me) and Twit­ter was in that no one is re­al­ly hang­ing out here any­mor space it was in be­fore Trump show’d up.

Real ad­ver­tis­ing? At the time, my pay as an ad­junct pro­fes­sor killed think­ing that way re­al­ly fast.
 

ap­ple only, are you kid­ding?
Then this: While Moki planned for FLOMM! THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923 to be playable across plat­forms, the fi­nal build was only for Ap­ple iOS.

And af­ter the güd re­views but low turnout upon launch, port­ing it to any­thing else was not go­ing to hap­pen from my pro­gram­mer – even though MOST GAMERS are on the An­droid OS, FLOMM! sim­ply would not be.

Also, we took up a LOT of hard dri­ve space with our back­grounds – large de­vice stor­age wasn’t stan­dard just yet. I start­ed hear­ing from peo­ple who were sim­ply delet­ing the game be­cause of the size.

And when iOS went to X – Sep­tem­ber 2016 – our game broke. Would not play on an Ap­ple de­vice for any­one with iOS X.

It only took 21 months for my his­to­ry game to be­come his­to­ry in the world of gam­ing.

In my own naïve view, I have fonts de­vel­oped over 20 years ago that are still down­load­able and us­able.

This game shit is a to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent beast to me.
 

 

As I write this, I’m talk­ing to nü pro­gram­mers about ver­sion 2. Be­cause just about all the code from ver­sion 1 was killed by Unity’s up­date (which is now re­al­ly sta­ble com­pared to wat we used) and Apple’s ded­i­ca­tion to planned ob­so­les­cence.

Nü killed our game about nü killing old. And the irony is not lost on me.

To­day, the FLOMM game is noth­ing mor than a fuck­ing ear­phone jack.
 

“The square is to us what the cross was to the ear­ly Chris­tians.”
—Theo van Does­burg, Dutch art move­ment De Sti­jl

“Con­flict is Uni­ver­sal.”
—Mor from the Man­i­festo of FLOMM
 

but
There was an­oth­er idea from my Graph­ic De­sign His­to­ry class that falls into all this – and it’s sor­ta cov­ered in MEG­GS’ Chap­ter 15 – but bet­ter cov­ered in one of the few Eng­lish books on the sub­ject, Paul Overy’s De Sti­jl (1991).

Like FLOMM, De Sti­jl had a man­i­festo, back­sto­ry, writ­ings, a dude named Mon­dri­an, Theo and all that.

De Sti­jl didn’t pull punch­es and wield­ed the pow­er of the print­ed word to sup­port and pro­mote Mod­ern Artists at a time when the Mod­ern World was still young.

And De Sti­jl af­fect­ed change on a HUGE scale.

And in 2016, the tra­di­tions of old, the anger of char­ac­ters like the ThWINGh and a na­tion­al­is­tic, proud but un­der­e­d­u­cat­ed pop­u­la­tion would make fight­ing nü bat­tles based on things that hap­pened about 100 years ago very, very im­por­tant.
 

con
tinue
read
ing —

                   forward to  PART 9   • • •

· · ·  back to  PART 7

—steve mehal­lo

Flom­mist Steve Mehal­lo is a graph­ic de­sign­er, il­lus­tra­tor, font de­sign­er, ed­u­ca­tor, food­ie and gad­fly. He is the cre­ator and founder of FLOMM!

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