Meadow Fresh

Size: 100+ pages including products database

My professional status: employee at Origin Design

Website client: Mainland Milk

Dates: January - November 2003

Categories: Front-end developer, Content-loader, jQuery/JavaScript, Old-school table layout, Flash, Database-driven (pre-CMS), Medium sites

Brief: initially to build and develop/maintain the main Meadow Fresh website. Subsequently we built five sub-sites - Breakfast with the Stars, Rainy Day Boredom Buster, Seedling Swap, Nature's Energy and Homegrown.

My responsibilities included:

  • Building the main website (architecture, navigation, HTML, content layout, graphics, popup windows)
  • Redrawing in Freehand many of the wonderful character sketches created by our illustrator Ali Teo - so that I could use them to make animated gifs, graphics and Flash animations
  • Creating a range of interchangeable and interlocking Flash animations which could be combined and reused on both the main website and Rainy Day
  • Working with the programmer to build templates and integrate these into the database-driven Products section of the site
  • Clear-cutting, adding shadows and other Photoshop manipulation of product photographs for the Products section
  • Developing, building and creating interactive animations for the About Milk section of the site which we updated in August 2003.

I enjoyed creating the templates for the products database and working with the programmer on these - it's always fun to see my templates come to life!

The Flash animation on the homepage was the most complex I had done at that point. I created it from the designer's rough pencil sketches, redrawn in Freehand and taken into Flash, adding my redrawn characters and then animating the whole thing. The milk "wave" for Spot the surfing dog was the trickiest part - getting the wave to animate properly and then working on the timing to get it just right.

My animation was later made into a TV commercial.

Other Meadow Fresh websites

Awards

Best Awards 2003

Finalist, Interactive Media & Website Design

Flash animation