Brandon James Flowers

I was born on March 19, 1975 in Stratford, Ontario, Canada son of Ted ( a family physician) and Dawn Flowers (nurse).

I was interested in art at an early age, and made my mother draw dinosaurs. I quickly learned how to pass time in the classroom doodling, and eventually learned to write given some extra attention by my teacher who realized I was having trouble with the concept as I preferred to express myself visually.

In highschool, I learned to program simple adventure games in basic and cobol after spending hours and hours playing quest games by the legendary Sierra Entertainment.

In 1995, I attended the University of Waterloo where I studied fine arts for a year and switched to an English Literature Major in my second year. After graduating from Waterloo, I struggled to find work as a writer. I couldn’t seem to make ends meet writing freelance articles in Kitchener including a major 50 year history on Glenn Gould at the Stratford Festival.

I decided to combine my love for writing, code and fine arts, and go back to a more practical school. I earned a new media diploma from Centennial College and found work with local firms as a hired Flash gun; the perfect weapon for applying design and code.

I spent the first 3 years of my career at Designaxiom working mainly as a Art Director for clients like American Airlines, Labatt, or Chase Manhattan who were drawn to sleek, animated interfaces. Working closely with our business partner Exchange Solutions, I helped them design rich-media user interfaces that were attractive, and moved users through complex business processes that managed and tracked their progress. I also created wire-frames, flow diagrams, and personas attempting to balance business objectives with end-user needs to better shape the design and create a responsive, intuitive experience following an interaction design methodology heavily influenced by the teachings of Cooper and Adaptive Path.

After 3 years of professional design, I moved into a developer role. I cut my teeth as a flash developer working for Navantis/Wunderman on MSN world trivia game that would be played out in real-time over the course of 4 weeks. I was mainly responsible for programming the game logic that relied on Flash/XML communication with ASP.NET. We also did some complex 1024-bit encryption to protect our users, and produced two versions in French and English. I lead two other flash developers, and defined the architecture and data requirements by writing web service contracts with the back-end developers.

I went on to lead a flash development team at Mindblossom, and you can read more hi-lights here which features highly interactive and creative projects for Mitsubishi and Sirius. I have fleshed out my development skills with deep research in design patterns, and object-oriented design.

I’m part of an open source AS3 framework development team called AS-HIVE, and am constantly looking for ways to push flash to its limits with new technologies like Papervision3D or by coming Flash with .NET to my own back-end in C# and SQL so that I can truly understand the full picture of multi-tier application architecture. As a Senior Developer at Push Interactive, I had the opportunity to play with the APE physics engine and prototype a AS3 game as well as an admin tool with Flex, C# and SQL Server.

Today, I’m a Senior Interface Developer at Blast Radius. I have a lot of ideas; enjoy working with a team; and can define and execute projects under tight deadlines. I will continue to push Flash, and now Flex and Silverlight working on the .NET platform building community-driven applications and games. He has never stopped being creative, and will try to use this blog to show some of his experimental prototypes, that are just itching to get out even if the paint is still wet.