Visit: Masato E-Card

Creator: Zayd Junglee (Flash design, programmer and implementor)
Time taken: 7-8 weeks
Platform: HTML, Javascript and Flash
Software used: Notepad, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9, Adobe Macromedia 8, Adobe premiere 6.5 and VirtualDub

This was a university team project achieving a total of 74% (Grade A). Personally I felt the content of the project could easily meet 80%, however, I felt the presentation of it in front of an audience did not facilitate the mark further, although what was shown completed the brief.

An E-Card is defined as being a local resource (usually a mini-cd) to be sent around, advertising the services/products provided by the business. In this case, the project was to create an introductory E-Card for potential students to attend the University of Gloucestershire’s Business School (where they mainly teach, Law, IT, Multimedia and Computing related courses).

The courses are based at Park Campus, therefore information about the local area and the university should be included. Obviously the main attraction and what interests the users are the individual course modules. It was essential to outline what was included, as well as showcase material. Finally, a section about pupils currently studying there was implemented as part of video manipulation in Flash.

The design of the E-Card took some time before any content could be put in. Organisation of content to be included was slow at the start – but as ideas came pooling in, the team begun to research and simplify to the necessary. In turn, all information was passed to me, where I formatted and created the dynamic sections to the E-Card.

The overall structure of the E-Card is quite complicated. It involved a large amount of ActionScripting (AS), but at the same time, as a designer – I was very aware of the structuring I had created. Therefore it was a matter of repeating the same process for each link (something which, in the future I would like to get around, i.e. create a template design and “fill-in-the-gaps”).

Overall, as the project developed through the communication made by all team members (via regular weekly meetings and messenger chat), the design was finalised and all targets were met according to the brief. I found this project very entertaining as it was interesting to hear ideas from the members of my group. This allowed for uniqueness in design.