Flurrious.com

I haven’t posted anything is the past few weeks because I was busy working on Flurrious.com — Digitas’ ‘09 holiday card.  It let’s you draw a snowflake and send it to a friend — and watch all of the other snowflakes other people make.  For each snowflake sent, Digitas donates $1 to UNICEF.

The site has done MUCH better than expected — over 23,000 snowflakes were made (in less than 2 weeks), and almost $7,000 donated to UNICEF. The site is pretty small at 200kb, but so far we’ve served over 600GB of data to users (most of it is probably the snowflakes that are being saved as PNGs on the server).

To create this application I had to do an extensive brush-up on my flash drawing API skills.  I’m using some of the new features from FP10 like IGraphicsPath and the 3D rotations (as well as Papervision3D). That graphics data is being saved in Vector arrays, and is stored on the database.  When you view a snowflake, that data is being passed back to flash, and then get’s drawn again with the same API.

In the next few posts I’ll talk about some of the techniques I used to create the application.  some of the highlights in my opinion are: saving and recreating vector data, creating smooth lines, and creating the circular slidres.  Creating the snowflake generative drawing I think was the least challenging thing in the site…

-itai