Wick Editor is a free, online and open-sourced creation suite for people to make digital frame-by-frame animations, games and art. Inspired by Adobe Flash, the software was created and is led by CMU alumni, Zach Rispoli and Luca Damasco. Unlike traditional animation software which only provides download versions, Wick Editor has no download requirement and is available for all users for free. With this user-friendly and low-cost model, digital arts can create more possibilities for people, especially those tech rookies, who wish to integrate the art and coding.

Features:

User-friendly Interface

Wick Editor is simple and easy to use. The size of the icons is large enough to be easily clicked. They are well-designed and standardized, thus allowing their functions to be recognized at a glance. To facilitate ease of use, text labels appear when users put their cursor on the icons. 14 basic icons, 1 tab bar and 5 menu items with average 5 options create effective web navigation.

Animation + Programming Environment

The developers of Wick Editor provide a creative environment combining its animation design and programming environment. It is particularly suited for users who are interested in playing with programming but do not have in-depth coding knowledge.

Wick Community

The Wick Editor respects and welcomes all users to make a contribution to the software. The source code is available for users to view, test and improve. Users are allowed to work with two main developers to fix the bugs and build the software on GitHub. Besides providing a user-friendly environment for people to create games and animations, Wick Editor is more like a tech community which attracts game and coding fanatics to test and modify the software. In the Community of Wick Editor, users are actively posting tech questions and sharing creative ideas, which boosts the intellectual and interactive part of the user experience.

Pros:

-       User-friendly

-       Programming environment

-       Multi-export preferences: Completed or unfinished works can be exported in multiple ways, including HTML, ZIP, GIF and Video.

-       Hot-Keys: Almost all most commonly used short-cut keys work with the web

Cons:

-       Mobile inaccessibility: Although Wick Editor is powerful on the desktop, but it is not optimized for mobile devices. Both the creation interface and the “About” page is not responsive to the mobile views. (Note: Mac users are recommended to use Firefox and Chrome instead of Safari to open the web.)

-       Limited tutorials: Only two tutorial videos are currently available on the website. They introduce basic ideas to the users but may not sufficient for everyone. Further, “Examples” button located in the main menu points to the “Tutorials” page, which would mislead the users.

-       Non-actionable template: The developers created various templates for users to learn how to create the effects. However, these templates are not available to be applied with users’ own materials in the editor.

-       No search bar

Wick creators are continually updating and fixing reported bugs to create a better design environment. Since its JavaScript edit table is the highlight, and Wick Editor is rolling out to more users, it would be helpful if creators add pop-up instruction windows to the design table. This would be useful as a tool for those users with zero coding experience to be able to follow the guidance step by step and thus better understand how to deal with the codes. Pop-up windows would be useful to tell users that they need to delete the “// Do something here!” first, and that they can then copy and paste the codes to that space. The current design makes it confusing for first time users to know where and how to insert the function code. Also, the SHARE button and Wick Gallery could be the additional features in Wick’s further development for improving user engagement and interaction.

All in all, Wick Editor is a fun and easy-to-do animation creation platform. Although it is not fully mature, their idea of gathering techies to develop for one software and attracting tech rookies to play with coding and get familiar with programming is something interesting to art and tech field.

Sources:

Rispoli, Zach, and Zach Rispoli. "Wick: Bringing the Spirit of Flash to the Modern Web." Medium.com. August 09, 2017. https://medium.com/@zrispo/wick-bringing-the-spirit-of-flash-to-the-modern-web-aad9ba3ce978.

 "Undergrads Zach Rispoli and Luca Damasco Launch Wick." School of Art | Carnegie Mellon University. September 26, 2017. http://www.art.cmu.edu/news/student/wick/.

"Wick Editor: Make Games, Animations, and Everything In-between." Wick Editor: Make Games, Animations, and Everything In-between. Accessed February 12, 2019. http://wickeditor.com/#about.