Sometimes in advertising you come across an idea that works so well in one place so you wind up finding other places to replicate it.

I Am Thankful

At the tail end of 2008, me and the other folks at Dixon Schwabl created a holiday themed website that was part self-promotion and part community involvement. For this project we collected a handful of messages from friends and family and we displayed them one at a time on an interactive Flash website. The website featured a snow globe and every time you "shook" the snow globe a new message would appear.

Users of the website were encouraged to add their own messages to the site, via a form in the Flash site. They could also add their message and send it to another person. When that person received the email it would include a unique URL that played their message first.

Here’s how it looked in action:

The 3D scene and the snow globe were created by my friend, Ian Auch. The movement of the snow globe and the triggering of the animations were something I remember spending hours tweaking until it felt right. I believe the dynamic animation of the text flowing in was based on a feature in Flash that let you animate letters individually.

Pluta Cancer Center

The Pluta Cancer Center website is a resource for patients and family members to get information on where and how their treatment programs took place. This project was one we launched in early 2009 and it featured one page where users could inspire others or be shown messages of support in an interactive way.

When you got to the You Can page, you would see curated messages floating in space. As you navigated around the word-cloud like interface you would see message snippets come in and out based on where you mouse was within the page. Clicking on a message showed the entire message and its author.

A button on the page brought up a Flash-based form—similar to the one in the holiday card—that let you submit a message and your relation to the organization. The messages here were processed on the web server and stored until someone re-entered it into the database of messages that fed the page.

To be honest, I may have programmed the full website or maybe just the You Can page of messages. It’s been long enough that I don’t recall, but I remember working on the You Can page. I remember we wanted it to feel like an open and endless space where someone would feel like there was endless support and people backing them up in their fight.

Fin

The holiday card’s user message feature was an example of us using our self-promotional work to prove out and learn our way through something that we eventually implemented for a client. This was something that we sometimes did from time to time as a way to use ourselves as the guinea pig before we could confidently sell a bleeding edge technology or solution to a client.

In the 2010s you might have used social media campaigns to accomplish what we did with these sites. You might even try to make a custom hashtag happen. What I liked about these sites were that they were almost less about promoting the brand and they were about moving someone emotionally with just a few lines of text—presented in a fun way.

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.

My first project for the ad agency, Dixon Schwabl Advertising, was a Flash-based microsite for a private K-12 school, Allendale Columbia. We called it ACAnswers and it featured a series of questions that were answered in the form of video testimonials by current students, alumni, and parents of students. The idea behind the site was to reach each of these segments and help relate the benefits of the school in a way where the audience can connect with the folks who have experience with the school.

What I Did

I entered into this project as a contractor, and over the course of about a week I took the Photoshop-based design and created this Flash-based website. The video clips were already shot and edited, so I created thumbnails and built out the homepage and each of the answer pages. I believe there were only two Movie Clips (in Flash terms) and the pages were programmatically created, but to be honest, at this time it’s possible we duplicated the answer pages and edited them by hand.

This project launched in 2007, then in 2008 a new set of videos were uploaded as the campaign was updated for another round.

Fin

This project was my foot in the door at DS. The single web developer that worked there at this time was a college professor of mine and he did a lot of work to kick off several web development projects, but before implementing them all he decided working at an agency wasn’t for him. He recommended the agency split his salary and hire me and a dedicated web designer to take all of the new business he had gotten and to carry those projects across the finish line.

I remember getting the call that the agency wanted to bring me on full-time and I remember it was exciting and I was very thankful for my professor for recommending me. I was being brought in as a Flash and HTML specialist as the agency began its journey to build out its web development team.

A couple of weeks later the check for this project arrived in the mail and I remember—now having steady income in reach—I went to the Apple Store to purchase my first iPhone. Little did I know where that would take me.