Idea/Concept

A number of photos of the research team were taken during the first year of the project, and Kay and Jane asked me, Ping, to create a photo gallery of the first group of workers on Project ECLIPSE. I decided to use Macromedia Flash to create a gallery that provides both a slideshow view and a thumbnail view to offer users a choice of the two formats. .

The Process

1. Flash document was set at 550px by 450px.
2. Realized that all the pictures were of different sizes which made layout difficult. Had to use Photoshop to trim and resize images in order to make them all relatively similar in size. All images ended up being resized and trimmed down to 400px by 300px.
3. Layout of the photo gallery is a simple one which includes a top title bar, middle photo area, and bottom navigation button area (Navigation buttons were placed close to one another in order to lessen the mouse movement when choosing to move back and forth between slides). The colors of the gallery were chosen to match the overall color scheme of the Eclipse site.
4. Pictures are not within the Flash document, but are retrieved from within the photo’s folder using Actionscript. Actionscript was also used to program the navigation buttons as well as the thumbnail pictures.
5. Final editing was performed on edges and color matching for a cleaner look.