CLIENT: Roxy
PROJECT: Design & Flash Programming for a YouTube-Compatible Website
followyourheart.roxy.com

For Roxy’s new summer campaign, they wanted a fun website that captured the Roxy brand identity, encouraged young women to follow their dreams, and gave site visitors the ability to submit videos in order to win a grant in order to go after their dreams. The design was easy: they already had a strongly-established identity for the campaign, so I simply explored ways to leverage their existing assets to create a very fun, active environment.

One thing I wanted to do was to create a sense of depth and seamless transitions between the site sections while keeping enough visual cues so that users knew when they had left one section and entered another. I did this by setting up a number of elements in the background (the clouds, the swirls, etc.) that are consistent from each page but shift in space and change color.

Technically, the site presented an interesting challenge. Roxy did not want to host the videos on their servers, so we needed to have a Flash site that could interact with YouTube’s API and pull videos from their servers onto the FYH site. I figured out the Flash side and then partnered with the excellent developers at Webtrix to create the CMS which gives Roxy a simple way to add, edit, and delete videos.

Incidentally, I was integrating the site using the YouTube ActionScript 2.0 Player API which at the time was only a couple weeks old. As a result, I had everything working fine except for unloading a previously-loaded video. I was banging my head against the wall for hours until I finally discovered an undocumented (at the time) function — destroy. So for all you people integrating YouTube into your Flash site, remember that destroy is your friend