Applied Flash Project:
Interactive Greeting Cards

Background

The School of Information Arts and Technologies has been invited to work with Smith and Haroff, a national advertising agency based in northern Virginia, to produce interactive greeting cards for the National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA). An interactive greeting card is essentially a small Flash movie suitable for delivery over the World Wide Web and via e-mail links.

Smith and Haroff have asked us to hold a student design competition, with the best product to be featured in NCTA's Internet advertising campaign. Smith and Haroff have also contributed prize money to be awarded to the design team whose project is selected, and to other teams who do distinguished work.

Since most of us have little or no spare time, I have decided to make the greeting card project an assignment for this course. The greeting card project is therefore a required element of your Flash portfolio, and your grade for this project will serve as your midterm progress review. Work for this project is due at the end of class on Saturday, October 16. Work turned in later will be graded but will not be eligible for prize consideration.

Flash labs during this project will be tailored to its purposes, and you will be given class time to work. Additional readings and discussion are suspended for the duration.

Task

The primary theme of the NCTA Market Expansion Campaign is "Nothing Says Christmas More Than a Real Tree." The electronic greeting card is meant to convey that message and evoke the emotions and nostalgia of the holiday with a central focus on the tree, NCTA members and campaign partners will send the electronic greeting card to their customers, friends, and colleagues. Smith and Haroff indicate that they want recipients "to feel touched by the design and language of the card."

As a design reference, please consider the electronic holiday cards designed by British artist Jacquie Lawson, which may be found at:

www.jacquielawson.com/thecards.asp

Pay particular attention to the card called "Christmas Cottage."

General Specifications

Smith and Haroff indicate that "we expect the winning student or group… to deliver a market-ready product. The programming must be multi-browser and platform compatible, bug-free and delivered in a commonplace format for hosting on NCTA's website."

File Specifications

Movie geometry should be the default setting, 550 width x 400 height. Use height and width settings of 100% at export to allow for scaling.

Your object file (.swf) must not exceed 200 kilobytes (200k). Consider preloading if any element is likely to require prolonged load time.

Intellectual Property

ALL WORK IN THIS PROJECT MUST BE ORIGINAL, or derived from a source which you know to be royalty-free and governed by an End User License allowing subsequent commercial application. You are required to specify the source of any sounds, graphics, or scripts not of your creation. I will disqualify any entries if I am not certain of provenance.

Smith and Haroff note: "NCTA will retain full usage and distribution rights to the project but will expect to give the author/authors branding space for themselves where appropriate (i.e., Created by John Doe, 2004, www.johndoe.com, etc.). The author(s) will also have full license to showcase their work provided it is not commercially sold or distributed without explicit written permission from NCTA."

Graphics

Use vector graphics exclusively, if possible. If you want to use a bitmap, consider converting it to vector by using Trace Bitmap tool in Flash, or a conversion method in another program.

Sound

Sound is a plus, but use music and other sound effects sparingly as they will seriously inflate file size.

Scripting

This project does not require scripting beyond simple sequence control (using gotoAndPlay, for instance). If you choose to include more sophisticated scripting, you must test your scripts thoroughly.

Competition Rules

Prizes will be awarded by the instructor in consultation with Smith and Haroff and other members of the IAT faculty. There will be separate prize pools for graduate and undergraduate students.

All projects are to be group activities, ideally involving equal effort from all team members. Any prize money will therefore be divided evenly among the group.

Since prize funds are limited, awards are independent of grades. Your project may receive a distinguished mark but still not finish in the money.

Disclaimer

Though this project relates to commercial, not religious activity, I understand the potential for concern about its focus on Christmas. Anyone for whom this poses a problem should speak to me. Your work is not required to include religious content.