This week I messed around a little more with the email form that I made earlier. I wanted to keep things simple but still have elements from the rest of the site that I wasn't sure was quite there with the earlier version of the email form. I played with drawings for the side and decided to the cactus since it is prevalent in most of the pages. I also played around with the idea of adding a custom scrollbar since I wasn't too fond of the default one that comes in flash since it kind of stands out like a sore thumb with the rest of the graphics which lend themselves to be warm and just a little grungy. First I tried messing with the components of the default scrollbar but all that gave me was errors so I searched around for a tutorial online and tried a few of them until I found one that actually worked. I'm pretty happy with it right now since it's shiny and new and working but who knows, I may still end up playing around with it. I should add that I had a few friends test the form out using the print and send options on their computers and it works.


Click Here to View Email Form

I recently purchased the ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional book and while I'm sure I won't use most of what is in the book I did come across something that I thought would help me in my website projects. There is a chapter in the book on Printing and sending email with actionscript. I decided to try this tutorial for my Little Giant site and came up with the following:


Click Here to View Email Form

I'm not sure if that will be the final layout for the page but I'm pretty pleased with the results. I don't seem to be coming up with any error messages so everything should be in working order but I've yet to fully test it out.

I tried working a little more on my portfolio site but I can't do much until I can get the problem fixed with the navigation. I still haven't figured out why that last frame on the page animation doesn't want to work. So I put that aside for a while and worked more on one of the fictitious restaurant sites I'm working on. At first I thought I wanted to do a sliced background in css for it but after fiddling with the code and images for several hours so I could get the sizes right and the tiling to be seamless I decided I didn't like how it looked with the background of my SWF file so I scraped it and went for a solid background until I can make something I like that doesn't seem too busy with the rest of the site. As far as working in Flash, I reconstructed pages, opting for several small image files versus one large image file. I've added the Career pages and you can now go back and forth between the page sections whereas before you had to hit the main button to go back to the main page to navigate to the desired page in Careers for instance.

On a side note, I will probably have to make a preloader for the site since the file is getting pretty large but I haven't started on it yet. So if it takes a while to load it's not because the page is empty, it's just taking a while to load.


Click to view site

I'm still working on the other site but I haven't nailed down a layout I want to use for the rest of the site. I want it to resemble a scroll, much like the print menu I made that is the inspiration for the site but I haven't decided how I want to go about doing that yet.

(I guess Blogger has it set to a different time zone because it says I posted this in Friday when it was 30 minutes past midnight here when I posted... Ah well...)

Sorry I'm a little late. I drove to Fort Rucker in Alabama to see my older brother who is flight school and it was family day so I got to see him fly and I thought I would be home on time to post but it's been a crazy sort of day. I fixed the problem I had last week with the buttons not targeting the flash file I wanted. It wasn't anything in the coding that I did wrong as far as I know... I ended up having to remake the buttons in Flash and then stuck in the same actionscript I used before and it worked so I guess Flash was just being buggy. You can click the link below the image to view the work I've done so far on it. (I should mention that the pen to the right will load the main SWF file that acts as an index to my portfolio since you can't see the links on the post-it or the links on the record player once the paper comes over it.)


Click Here to View Index Page

I am having another problem with it unfortunately. For some reason Flash doesn't want to load the last frame of the file I'm targeting externally and it's where I have the actual thumbnail images to the site content and eventually links that will take you to larger images of those files. I'm not seeing anything wrong with actionscript again and it's driving me a little batty trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong because if I load that file by itself it works perfect it's just when I try to load it from my main SWF file that it starts to act wonky. In any case here is what one of the last frame of one of the sections will look like. There will probably be at least a total of three of these, one for each section of the site. This is just a preview of what will be on the actual paper index. I decided to lay everything out in Illustrator first since it's so much nicer playing around with image, font, and line placement there.



I decided on image links to my creative package which will like the links say take you to images of a business card, letterhead, and envelope I designed as part of a portfolio package in my last advertising class. I'm hoping to learn how to integrate light box with Flash in this project and that'll be a great learning experience for me. I've found a few tutorials, it's a matter of sitting down, making myself sit down and read it step by step instead of breezing through and skipping steps like I usually like to do with tutorials (A really bad habit).