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.
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.
Rich media with an in-ad game promoting the new Jak II Sony Playstation game.
Constructed over two days at Adobe Flash Camp 2008. Avenue Fighter is a political-themed Twitter-controlled street fight done up in classic 8-bit Nintendo “Street Fighter” style.
A dynamic display ad that took data from the eBay Motors API and displayed said data using the Yahoo Maps API. Geotargeting was used in ad trafficking, allowing the map […]
A Flash kiosk application created for deployment by Adidas at the 2007 Boston Marathon. When in place, allowed the user to enter their “reason” for running, take a photo (using the kiosk’s onboard camera), and receive a takeaway one-sheet containing (amongst other things) their photo, their reason, and a splash of Adidas branding.
Created a mobile landing page/microsite ad for Honda Civic with a responsive layout. Allowed one codebase to be served to all handsets regardless of OS. Included use of embedded HTML5 […]
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 […]
Flash animation created for use as a sales loop video at Earthlink events. + Flash development
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
It looks a little chintzy, but YOU try fitting a physics engine, sound AND good graphics into a non-rich media ad. Final ad size fit nicely under the 40k limit… coming in at a svelte 37k