Picture it! The year, 1998. Me, a fresh faced wide-eyed young man taking on his first in house graphic design position, and the world was at my fingertips…lol…
I’d been doing freelance off and on for years, but this was the first in house design position I’d held. I’d gone in to interview for an Administrative Assistant position and after talking to they wanted me for their designer. I am that awesome..lol..
The company was developing (is developing, they’re still around) catalog software for the HVAC and plumbing industries. This was a time when 650 MB CD’s were the medium, those business card sized cd’s were a novelty, and the Palm Pilot was exciting, and Blackberry with it’s keyboard revolutionized life…lol..
And developing in Adobe Flash was still viable.
Forgive these videos, they were all done in Adobe Flash and there is just no way to capture the interactivity anymore, so screen capturing a walkthrough is the only way.
But, at the time when I got there the company had been using short .avi openings for the catalogs that could take a sizable chunk of the 650MB on a CD. I had been doing some development in Flash (and Director, well trying) and thought we could do better.
They could add,, and run, an .exe file at the beginning of the catalog and set it to autorun when the media was inserted.
The beauty of Flash was the relatively simple way we could increate value by adding information and interactivity to the front of the catalogs in a resolution independent format (vector) and at a much smaller file size than the .avi at the time.
There are plenty of glaring design issues, but at the time these were innovative…lol…
