This was one of my first sites after getting out of school (many many years ago, because i’m old now ), and it was such a huge learning experience. I learned so much about flash, typography, and color theory with this project and put countless hours into this. It was an honor to do something for Alicia Key’s non profit, and an even bigger honor to be a web finalist at Austin’s SXSW.

Shout out to all the guys at Hardball Creative who took me in and let me run on this one.

Olliekoalas.com was a really fun and intense project. It was more of a promotional site then, as nobody KNEW what Ollie Koalas was in Jacksonville, and it had to be extremely enticing to kids.

This site was almost completely in flash, but still extremely lightweight and fast loading. Everything that could have been redrawn as a vector, was redrawn as a vector, art assets and fonts were shared so they only had to be loaded one, photographic images were all being pre-loaded during the appropriate lulls….a LOT went into this site.

However, if I was to do this site today, I would definitely make it more of a hybrid site. The SEO wasn’t great for Olliekoalas.com, and the updates were a beast. Flash deeplinking would be great, not just to re-enable the back and forward buttons on the browser, but also to create landing pages. An XML driven nav, and all XML driven content would also have helped in upkeep.

Overall, I’m still really happy with the site. It accomplished the goal of creating an experience that kids welcomed (and offered financial incentives for those kids to push their parents to go to Ollie Koalas), and completely killed anything Chuck E. Cheese had up at the time.

This really make me want to redo my current site into something more animation friendly…hhhhmmmmmm…

This is a little animation I did for all the gamers out there for Christmas this year. It’s a few days late…but aye…better late than never.

Mad props to Mafialligator for putting together and giving away such a great chiptune track Another Very 8-Bit Christmas rocks!

Anyways, lemme know what you think. Definitely open to suggestions and criticisms. Hopefully the next one will be much more professional and timely. If you have any requests or ideas, drop me a line in the comments below.

P.S. Major props to anybody who can name all of the characters in it.

P.P.S. Special shouts outs to a few gamers in particular…Robby1051, @videogamegirl, @guysgirl, Rich Rosado (your kindness at E3 inspired this), Raheem/Random/MegaRan (honestly debated putting Megaran in this….maybe next time), and all the kids in my classes this year (Ivonne, Klara, Justin, Jason, Sean, Kyle, Deb, Nina, Andrew, Breaker, Toni, Kareem,etc. .) You guys inspire me to stay on top of my game.

Flash AS3 Contact Form and Text Event Listeners

For those of you new to Flash who just want to knock out an AS3 contact form…here you go!

Once you download the file, you’ll notice you can use either 1) normal text fields or 2) UI components from the components panel.

There’s also ton of additional methods, properties, and event handlers commented within the file.

Lastly the code you’ll need for the php file, is commented within the file itself. Use that code to create a file called “mail.php” and 1) remember to enter in the email address you want the form to go to and 2)  remember where you upload it!

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments below. Otherwise, download and enjoy!

http://bit.ly/flash-as3-contact-form