Back to Entry Page

Assignment 2: Banner Ads

Due Saturday, February 24 at 9:30 am

Project: Develop the following three movies in Flash 5:

  1. A personal signature or "splash" animation for the Assignments page you built last week. This movie should feature your name along with some other identifying symbol, slogan, motto, fetish, etc.

  2. A banner advertisement for the School of Communications Design incorporating Ed Gold's new logo for the School, as well as the U.B. logo (see foot of this page), and any other graphics and text you consider appropriate. Source files for the Communications Design and UB logos (Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop) are in the logo folder within multimediaShare on Crow. You're probably better off using the Illustrator files, since they are vector graphics.

  3. A banner advertisement for a fictitious product or service, consisting of at least two scenes. Viewers must click on the banner to access the second scene. Your concept must create maximum motivation for that act of engagement or click-through.

Advice: Try to demonstrate overall (not necessarily in each movie) a range of design techniques and media elements, including scaling, color/alpha effects, animation, and sound. You will need at least one simple button action for Movie 3, but no elaborate scripting or hypertextuality is required at this point.

Specifications: You must comply with the following requirements.

  1. Prepare each banner with a width of 600 pixels and a height of 200 pixels. Maximum file size for the Shockwave file (.swf) is 50 kilobytes.

  2. Name your three source files as follows: yourLastName.201.fla, yourLastName.202.fla, and yourLastName.203.fla. Fill in your name. In Windows the ".fla" extension is added automatically; Mac users will have to do this manually.

  3. FTP these source files to your Assignment2 directory on Cow.

  4. Export a Shockwave Flash (.swf) movie for each banner and transfer these files also to the Assignment2 directory. Use whatever settings you find appropriate image quality, sound, anti-aliasing, and looping (though I recommend 100% JPEG quality).

  5. Export a static JPEG at 600x200 px for each of your movies. This image should represent an appropriate state of the movie. Transfer these files to the Assignment2 directory.

  6. Create a Web page called Assignment2.htm. This page should contain <IMG> tags for each of the four JPEGs you exported in the previous step. Set up anchor containers around these images so that each is linked to a subsequent page called yourLastName.201.htm, yourLastName.202.htm, and yourLastName.203.htm. (Fill in your name.)

  7. Create the three pages to which you referred in the previous step. On each page, include appropriate <OBJECT> and <EMBED> containers to include the relevant movie. HINT: if you use the Publish function in Flash, all you need do is rename the resulting .htm file. FTP these three pages to your Assignment2 directory. (Note that we're not creating any subfolders here, so your Assignment2 directory will end up looking a bit crowded.)

  8. Edit your index page (the page you created in Assignment 1) as follows:

    1. Replace the contents of row 1 with <OBJECT> and <EMBED> containers to include your signature movie in place of the 600x200 banner JPEG currently at the top of the page. Delete the anchor container currently around that image.

    2. Replace the banner graphic in row 2 with the JPEG you exported from your third, click-through movie. Leave the dimensions set to 300x100 and don't change the anchor container, which points where it should.


  9. Write a brief note indicating any strategies and features used in this assignment of which you are especially proud. You might also want to explain your approach to the third movie. Place this note in the second cell of row 2 of your index page.

  10. Send mail when your work is complete.

University of Baltimore Logo

Copyright © 2002 School of Information Arts and Technologies