Lacy Garrison » Projects

“Drawing Down, Moving Ahead”

Lacy Garrison — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:18:52 +0000

I started working at the NYTimes.com as a Design Tech in April. It has been a great experience and I’m happy to report that I love my job.

Today was the first time my name appeared on the website. I was pretty excited about it. Here are some pictures from the Interactive Feature: “Drawing Down, Moving Ahead“.

Commonwealth Utilities Update

Lacy Garrison — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:23:28 +0000

Commonwealth Utilities is having their latest fashion show today. I’ve been racing the clock to update their website with a new look to match their new season. I spent a good deal of time making the site a richer experience and focusing the design more on their products.

Commonwealth Utilities Relaunched

Lacy Garrison — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:00:36 +0000

The guys at Commonwealth Utilities and I launched the redesign of their website yesterday. I built the site in Flex for a variety of reasons.

One of the more interesting aspects of the site to me was integrating the “Join the CWU” page with MailChimp. I would really like to thank Christan Cox for the publishing some sample code on how to do this in Flash.

After trying a few different ways to replicate Christan Cox’s code in Flex, I eventually decided to customize his sample code in Flash to match the design, export the code as a SWF, and load the SWF into Flex at run time. It worked like a charm.

We still have some big plans for this site. I will keep you posted as we flesh out the site more over the next few weeks.

Baby Phat iPhone App

Lacy Garrison — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:53:50 +0000

Awesome Interactive (my company) launched the Baby Phat Cam, our first iPhone application, this week. David, Chandelier Creative, and I spent a several months working on it. It was a great learning experience and I am very proud of the app.

Gore-Tex Gear Corner Launches

Lacy Garrison — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:34:48 +0000

goretexgearcorner.com launched. I worked on this project with the very talented people at Format Studio.

The idea behind goretexgearcorner.com was to create a microsite to provide helpful tips and market products to avid hunters. The main portal to the microsite is a viral widget placed around the Internet.

You can see the widget in context by scrolling really far down fieldandstream.com or outdoorlife.com.

I developed the widget using Adobe Flex 3. This widget is the first SWF I’ve developed in Flex. I have to say I was very impressed with the capabilities of Flex. The Accordion navigation container helped me to create this project quickly. I spent the majority of my development time skinning the widget and smashing bugs.

Speaking of bugs, the widget incorporated Gigya’s Wildfire. Wildfire is a nice little chunk of code that steamlines embedding widgets on a large number of social networking sites; it’s perfect for spreading a viral widget.

However, I had a horrible time working with Wildfire. The documentation is confusing and incomplete. Here are a few tips I learned the hard way.

Facebook.com does not allow iframes. You must embed the SWF with embed and object tags.
WordPress.com doesn’t allow embed or iframe tags. Gigya doesn’t explain how to put your SWF on WordPress.com well. WordPress recently introduced a tag to support Gigya. You must use WordPress’s [gigya] tag to embed your SWF.
Blogger.com allows iframes.
Myspace.com allows embed and object tags, but not iframes.

The other buttons may or may not work in the widget. Project timeline didn’t allow for me to test or debug all of them. We set the remaining buttons to the default iframe code and left the other social networks to catch as catch can.