kerri gifford's
Software Development

The world of software (WICAT Systems, Inc. and Waterford Testing Center) is where I began my digital career. I illustrated and assisted in the development of educational and testing software for children preschool thru grade 8. I instigated evolutions of techniques that helped the companies to maximize the use of hardware and software limitations (it was only 2 to 16 colors in those days.) I pushed the integration of Macintosh software with the company software--which became a company wide technique for building our illustrations. And I was key in the request to find ways to minimize the tremendous space bitmaps then consumed. This solution used bitmaps efficiently for animations and speedy downloads.\

Click on all thumbnails to see full-sized downloads.

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

ILLUSTRATION

Daisy Quest was developed by Adventure Learning Software in 1992 and was published by Great Wave Software. Except for a very few graphics, I was the designer and creator of all illustrations supporting this preschool reading learning adventure. The entirety of the program fit on four 3.5 floppy disks. This included full screen graphics of virtual settings for the adventures produced out of a mere 16 colors, over one hundred illustrated objects to be used as educational and testing "items", animations, and a sophisticated program that monitored the childs progress thru 16 different pre-reading exercises. This was high tech stuff at the time.

Click here to see the full screen image for the main menu. The cave, the cottage, the forest and the ship were all hot spots for virtual adventures.

Daisy's Castle, the sequel to Daisy Quest was an equally involved project. Great Wave Software put it up for market in 1993.

These are just some of the characters the child was able to choose from in order to participate in the Daisy adventures. Their pixel dimensions are quite constrained so it was a fun challenge making them look good in such little spaces. Keep in mind, digital tablets and pens were not commonly accessable yet and Photoshop was only being used by the "Big Guys."

I had a blast constructing the "items" for the project.