APR 10, 2008

Starbucks Coffee At Home

Will 7 Comments Development, Flash

Studioblog Image

Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.

At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.

Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.

  1. Using Flash's display.BitmapData class, they're making a PNG of the current section's movieclip and placing it in the movieclip that contains all of the erased background images and setting the container clip's alpha to an appropriate amount. If this was the case, they'd have to be using ActionScript 3 because of display.BitmapData's performance issues in ActionScript 2.
  2. Each section was manually saved as a PNG that was imported into Flash and alphaed down.

Being a product site, it's likely to have little to no dynamic content, so I'm thinking the Flash Developers went with the simpler, second option.

7 comments
MichaelAPR 10, 2008

3. Maybe it was just an accident. A bug that turned into a feature.

RobbieAPR 10, 2008

I was also thinking today it could just be the MovieClips themselves, but that's essentially #2 with clips instead of PNGs.

JakAPR 10, 2008

pretty snazzy

MattAPR 17, 2008

I'm doing this on a project at work now, with AS3. Each page is a dynamic SWF - when the pages switch I take a BD snapshot of the current page and unload SWF - then I load the new page and fade the old one out, nice cross fade effect. But if I left the old one up it would be the same effect.

MattAPR 17, 2008

The more I thought about it the cooler I thought it was. I did a quick demo here, with source available also.
http://udon.nudoru.com/?p=144

RobbieAPR 18, 2008

Awesome, Matt!

WillAPR 18, 2008

Nice!

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