Pronounced like “chimera”, and modeled after said word… Kimera GPS (“glyph pack system”) is the codename for a process I created wherein “font-packs” are compiled on-demand by the server and fed to dynamic display ads in the wild.
Pronounced like “chimera”, and modeled after said word… Kimera GPS (“glyph pack system”) is the codename for a process I created wherein “font-packs” are compiled on-demand by the server and fed to dynamic display ads in the wild.
Whilst creating dynamic display ads (using Oxford) for eBay, projects would arise where we would need to develop creative for the eBay Partner Network. This meant that the ads would be showing headlines and other text in languages other than english. Each time one of these projects rolled down, we would get a list of the countries/languages which we would be developing ads for, and invariably, one of those languages would be Chinese. Luckily, Chinese was always amongst the languages REMOVED from the list before entering development, but the specter of having to create ads capable of displaying asian charactersets always hung over my head.
Kimera is a process wherein, when an ad loads in the wild, after receiving its configuration information (containing its desired text to display) the ad then contacts the Kimera-enabled server, tells it what text it intends to display, the server (which possesses the full characterset) then generates a swf which contains the embedded font outlines for ONLY the glyphs that are to be displayed in the ad.
For ads using the Latin-I characterset, this results in font-outline bytesize dropping to ~2k (from the aforementioned 10k) The bytesize savings when dealing with other charactersets are even larger. Above all, it actually makes the idea of creating dynamic display ads for asian languages not just possible but executable with near-english bytesize results.
+ Flash development
+ PHP development
+ system architecture
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 08:49. It is filed under Spare Time, Work and tagged with AS2, AS3, banners, dynamic display advertising, Flash, fonts, HaXe, php, SWFMill. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Flash animation created for use as a sales loop video at Earthlink events. + Flash development
In the early 2000’s, Nissan was set to relaunch its fabled “Z” model. Chiat was tasked with creating the microsite to build buzz and provide enthusiasts with a few tasty media bits prior to the launch of the 350Z. Link to archived site here. + Flash development
A reusable AS3 codebase, used to create dynamic display ads for eBay. Packages up all of the service calls, load management, asset/font management, etc into a nice little package that’s fairly lightweight and super-easy to integrate into each project’s Flash creative. Drops development turnaround time for dynamic creative from a couple weeks to about […]
Dynamic display advertising campaign created for (the online) Nike Store. Applied concepts of polymorphism and runtime compositing to create a lightweight shell which pulled in the proper visual and text assets depending on the configuration received from the server.
I have a new source of time-suckage, and its name is the Kinect. Back in December, someone hacked Microsoft’s Kinect.. allowing computers to interface and receive raw data from the full-body motion/gesture sensing device. A week or two ago, in early January, another group created an AS3 solution. The solution consists of a command-line socket […]
A website for Sony’s upscale boutique brand of home electronics.
Created a concise mobile site for Methodist Health System using the Javascript mobile framework jQTouch. Having looked at the analytics for the client’s site, I determined that the current mobile users had been visiting bestcare.org looking for a distinct subset of information. So, rather than try to cram all of the content from the standard […]
An interactive video rich-media ad which follows a woman on her morning run. As she moves through the seasons, her wardrobe changes and a selection menu is displayed behind her. At any given moment, the user can select from the product menu, see details about that particular product, and (if they wish) go directly to that product’s page on the Nike Store site.
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Provided Full Stack Development services for Republic Project. Day-to-day technologies used were Flash, HTML5, Javascript, and PHP/MySQL. Republic Project was a startup that was later bought by DG | Mediamind, which later spun off it’s digital ad business under the name Sizmek. At Sizmek, Republic Project’s product was relabeled “Sizmek Social” I continued to support […]