Ari is no Johnny Come Lately to the "wired world" (probably because his name is Ari, not Johnny). His Internet roots can be traced back to 1988, when as a wayward freshman at the University of Florida he became an avid VAXer, discovered e-mail, relay chat, talk, the USENET and early BBS communities. Alas, Ari was far more interested in nursing kegs and cutting class than writing boring programs in VMS Pascal so his stint as a Comp Sci major didn't last very long. Even so, Ari continued to be active on the Atari ST platform where he eventually collaborated on a number of shareware and commercial game projects. This experience gave him important insights into interface design, application design and 2D animation.
Yearning to put his passion for computers to use and make a living, he eventually became part of the burgeoning New York New Media scene. Since the halcyon days of 1995, Ari has held various Internet-related positions at the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, Columbia House Online, Simon & Schuster Online, iVillage, the ad-sponsored game startup ZapSpot and ad agency heavyweights Wunderman Cato Johnson and Ammirati Puris Lintas. Along the way, Ari's had to work his way up the rungs of the ladder more than once. He likes to quote Antwone Fisher on that experience: "It don't matter what you tried to do, you couldn't destroy me! I'm still standing! I'm still strong!"
In addition to his interactive work, Ari is also a skilled pixel artist and game designer who has worked on a variety of casual adware, freeware, shareware and commercial entertainment packages for both desktop computers and mobile devices. However, he's probably best known as the creator of SpriteLib, a free collection of pre-drawn 2D artwork that has made appearances in such popular game development tools as GameMaker, Game Editor, and The Scrolling Game Development Kit. It has been featured in or bundled with over a dozen computer programming books since 1996.
Speaking of computer books, Ari actually wrote one of this own called "Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics" (ISBN: 1-55622-755-8). Although he colorfully refers to his tome as a "500 page piece of shit", it did receive some good reviews. In late 2003 the book was taken out-of-print so Ari gave Professor Mark Overmars permission to distribute the book for his GameMaker project, where it is available as a free download. Ari has also written about user interface design and some of his work has been made into a Case Study.
When he's not working on new product features or enhancements, Ari enjoys spending time with his wife Jennifer, learning new software, feeding his ever-hungry iPod, perusing various industry blogs and designing iPhone games.
The Flying Yogi Colophon
The site's unusual colophon was inspired by the absurd practice of Yogic Flying, a Transcendental Meditation technique that combines meditation with a form of cross-legged hopping.
About This Site
This site was developed on a Mac running OS X "Leopard" using Coda. Additonal web geekery is performed using custom Perl scripts and FancyZoom. |
