Flash Out of the Box

Chapter 11. Building a Reusable Ad Template

In this chapter, we’ll use some crafty Flash techniques to create a project template for a movie that contains formatted text, images, animation, and a form, all of which are updatable by altering external files. These techniques keep you productive and your clients happy even if a project’s contents need to be updated repeatedly.

As stated in Chapter 10, one of the most significant benefits of modularizing Flash content is that you can easily update and maintain elements of a project.

To help you see why the modular architecture is important, here’s a hypothetical situation for you (and yes, things like this do happen in real life):

Your client comes to you and says he needs a series of information pieces designed for the company’s web site. Each piece should maintain a consistent look and feel, tell a story about what the company can do for its customers, and end with a screen where users fill out a small form to request a catalog and choose whether to join the mailing list. Each piece will appear in a priority section on the home page for one week.

Since the new campaign is meant to become the focus of the home page for the next several weeks, we’ve got some extra space to work with—we don’t have to stick to the typical ad banner size (468 x 60). The maximum width we can use for the ads is 580 pixels. Height matters less, but we should try to make sure the piece can be seen completely by the user without scrolling down the page (borrowing ...