My friends over at chillingo contacted me to cook up a 300x100 Adobe Flash animation, 300x100 gif animation of the Adobe Flash animation and a 728x90 JPG banner.

Briefing:

Some ideas/phrases I want to convey:
Chillingo
Developing for iphone?
Publish through Chillingo
Want to maximise sales?
The most successful publisher ---- maybe follow with a flash-up image of Zen Bound and iDracula (like blipverts)

Since it was about iPhone i thought about integrating user interface elements of the iPhone. Since the space was quite limited I decided to go with the top bar of the iPhone user interface, which shows the carrier, time and battery status. Instead of the carrier I choose the company name chillingo. I replaced the time with the chillingo slogan, Innovate, Publish, Play.
Since this was a longer animation, I thought about integrating something that would show the current status of the animation. I choose the battery meter for the flash animation to reflect the status of the animation. I wanted to give it a nice dynamic by increasing the overall speed of the animation. All elements have been created from scratch.
Following the result of the Adobe Flash animation:





This animation turned out larger than I thought. It ended up being 148kb, too much for my taste. So I was working on the same animation and skipping the screenshot part which resulted in the following light weight version of 52kb:





After that I was working on the GIF animation which is shown below:



The final piece was a static 728x90 JPG version and no animation. The result below has been made smaller to match the dimensions of this blog:



My friends at chillingo were happy, all I care about.

The client is located in Germany and asked me if I would be able to work on an ad campaign for them.
I said yes and received the briefing:

Needed:
Print: Design for postcard advertisement to give out at various places.
Flash Animation: Flash animation that matches overall design of print design in various sizes.
GIF Animation: As close as possible to the Flash animation that will be shown to visitors without Flash capabilities.
Static images: Static images of animation that will be shown to visitors without Flash capabilities.
Content:
Picture: Thoughful/Sad/Angry woman with crazy hair.
The Picture is the vocal point and needs to carry the whole ad campaign.
Text: Jolie.de/Styler, You don't Need a Man - Just a New Hair Cut

Since the photo is the vocal point I made sure get a few images, the client can pick from. I submitted a view photos and I guess I am way to americanized :) after 8 years in the USA. I choose photos with a lot of expression, character and color. I had to pull it back a bit as the client said we need it a bit more conservative. I had to readjust a bit to the wants and needs for Germany :) I submitted a view more conservative images and one made the cut.
Based on this image I created the following print ad:



The client liked the result and I went ahead to get the flash animation started.
Following is the result that the client picked:



Based on this animation I created 3 additional flash banner sizes. Exported them to work as animated GIF and combined the animation to make sense as a static JPG file.

The client was happy, all I care about.

For this job I needed to incorporate supplied photos and text into a flash advertisement with the size restriction of 300x250 pixel.
I have been given all freedom about what is happening within the flash animation as long as all required elements are included.

Required elements were product photographs, text and a link to a specific URL.

The deadline for this project was the end of the same day.
The beauty of flash is that you are only limited by your own imagination.

The only draw back is that even though it is widely spread and accepted there are still a significant amount of internet users out there that do not have a flash player installed on their system. All these internet user will not be able to see any flash animated content. Before you plan on using flash for your website make sure your target audience is capable of viewing it.

It was quite some fun to open up the Adobe Flash application again that I haven't worked in for many many months. I decided on a rather simple approach to get the message across. The basic Idea was to make sure the viewer sees certain items throughout the entire animation, which was the company logo and the product name. Then adding recommendations, price, time frame of the special and flip through the photographs. The challenge in flash is to get the timing right. The result was 40 kb in size which would be impossible to even attempt to with a GIF animation. In the end I had what I think is a presentable solution and submitted it to the client. The client loved it and is happy, all that matters to me.