As the "Flash guy" in my early career, there were several projects that were primarily developed by another developer where I would pop in and add a video player, an interactive timeline, a carousel, or some other interactive and self-contained piece of content. Some of the details around who did what are a little fuzzy nowadays, but I can tell you about the parts I got to take part in.
Let’s go!
SentrySafe
One of the first projects I worked on at Dixon Schwabl was to add a homepage animation and a video player to the SentrySafe corporate website. The homepage video was an animation that promoted their document safes that were pitched as being the ideal place to store electronic media (CDs, flash drives, etc).
The video player featured videos or segments that ran on various national TV programs that featured their products. We added the ability to select from a few different videos and the video would be played in Flash’s default video player UI.
ARC of Monroe County
The ARC of Monroe County was a special site for us at DS. We loved promoting organizations who took care of our neighbors and their family members. For their main website we broke it up into four main sections, and for each section there was a title page that had links to all of the section’s pages on the left. On the right was a looping video that featured members of the ARC community holding signs with letters on them that spelled out the section name.
My role in this project was to provide the video player without any UI. This was in the days before you could use the <video> tag, so the video was created in Flash and it was carefully edited to make sure it blended in with the white background of the page.
Clark Patterson Lee
CPL was a website for a Rochester, NY-based architecture and planning firm. To be honest, I don’t remember who was the primary developer on this site, but I think it was my friend, Wayne Gormont, who did most of it. I remember sprinkling in little parts here and there where images faded from one color to grayscale or where an image gallery was needed.
These days many of these little Flash areas we created for it could be accomplished through 3-4 lines of CSS and they are par for the web development course, but back when this site was designed it included a lot of thinking that was ahead of its time.
The PIKE Company
We had a long relationship with The PIKE Company and we were heavily involved in several redesigns of their website. The first one we worked on was mostly developed by Wayne and I don't think I was involved in the initial release of the website. I think it was a little later on when they wanted to add an interactive timeline that showed the history of the company.
The Pike Timeline was my contribution to the project and it was a pretty straightforward display of images and text along a horizontal timeline. Maybe it’s just me, but I remember doing many of these back when the web was new, but I don’t see this all that often on corporate sites anymore.
Fin
This doesn’t include all of the times where I added Flash pieces to websites, but this represents an idea of how I was involved in some of our early projects from 2008 to 2009. I really liked the role I had where I could touch so many projects while sharing it with the other developers I worked with.
Eventually these skills I was learning about how to animate and visually set the tone for a project would translate really well as we started picking up jQuery, Greensock, Three.js, and other interactive web technologies. What you can do now in JavaScript or even in CSS would have blown my 2008 mind.