Richard Leggett on New Media

Time to catch up. I've been at AKQA for a little while now and I've enjoyed it thoroughly so far and I really feel a strong commitment to the team. My first project went live the other day, www.nikerunning.com, even though it's aimed at runners (of course!) I hope you enjoy it even if you are not. My favourite sections are the shoe selector and technology section. I'm no photographer, but after this I've started to appreciate good photos; you can hit the home button to get 3 different scenes for the home page, I wish I'd gone on shoot for the coastal one!

The site went unexpectedly smoothly (for a Flash project!), so I have to thank the creative team because they are truly superb. This time round I took some time to write a mini component set that the whole thing is based on, I find that Flash sites like this are on the whole very creatively driven and without a pretty flexible base to build on you can find you need to start hacking things to do things they weren't thought out to do originally (which is understandable). Basically I wanted to make sure that anything that was going to go wrong was going to be through fault of my own.

I've also finally come to find a nice architecture for Flash 8 (or lower) projects, perhaps even an AS3 only Flash 9 project that seems to handle all of the expectations we now have with "experience" sites. Some of these expectations include integration with the back/forward browser buttons (including deep links to sections and products), localising every aspect of the site from the menu structure to the copy and content contained within the site and as much as possible future proofing the site for upcoming phases throughout it's lifetime.

Time to get back to the grind, hope to hear any suggestions from runners or fellow Flashers on what we could do to improve the site moving forward.