Tami Weiss

Hello,

I am a web designer and sometimes developer in the Milwaukee area. I created beautiful, standards compliant webpages that are not only usable, but deliciously delightful. Check out my portfolio.

• You win some, you lose some (but you still learn).

  November 1st, 2009

  Perhaps one of the hardest things about being  a designer is when you pour your heart and soul into something and it fails to launch. Maybe a client changes their mind, or a project is de-prioritized and never finished. Whatever the case, all the time and love spent on something can seem like a colossal waste.

  I recently had that happen this Halloween. We were to prepare a batch of ads for Myspace, and they were encouraging us to have edgy banner ads. After planning – no – conspiring with one of the marketers Katie, we came up with a great idea involving the flasher costume:

  More specifically, Katie says to me “Can we animate it?” which is all it takes to kick my creativity into high gear. What’s more fun that making a borderline offensive ad of a guy flashing his fake pubs. And we were in luck, there was a pre-flash picture along with the picture of the flashers coat wide open. Because its right during our busiest season, and because I really want to make this happen, I take it home to finish over the weekend.

  One thing that quickly became apparent was that to make a half page ad (430×600) and still have it look nice, I was going to run into file size issues. Fortunately, myspace’s ad specs allow for larger files to be inserted after a 50k file load. So I create the animation as an external swf to play after it and the initial banner image loads. I’ve done this before, but never for loading large ads. But it works perfect, we wanted the image to pause with the coat closed for effect, then surprise! Flasher!

  Monday rolls around and at the office, it is universally loved, and sent off to myspace. One day passes, and we don’t hear anything, then two, then three. I was a bit concerned, maybe my use of external files were a problem after all. Finally Katie calls to find out the status. It turns out it was rejected for content. Yes, Myspace who was demanding edgy banners thought the mildly edgy banner was too risque.

  The good news in this all, though, was that I got to try a new way of approaching a problem. I had often wondered how certain flash ads that were clearly over the size of a normal banner ad or had a new way of compressing images and keeping the quality up that I hadn’t heard of. Now I know that at least in some cases there is a work around that some sites allow. And while my banner may never see the light of day outside here, it was still fun to make.

  | Tags: banner ads, costume, Flash, flasher, myspace
  Posted In: Flash | No Comments »