Posted by: todd on April 07, 2005 @ 7:27:51 am
www.espn.com
Company Overview: ESPN.com is the leading provider of sports content on the Internet. ESPN.com provides its users, with late breaking news, statistics, schedules, and player updates, in addition to up-to-the minute sports scores from live events. ESPN.com offers informational incentives to its users, including ESPN Insider, Page 2, articles from ESPN The Magazine, Fantasy games and more. Sports enthusiasts choose ESPN.com, making it the No. 1 sports content site.
Process/Challenge: While with the Walt Disney Corporation, I was a part of the team that produced the overall design for ESPN.com. We were responsible for maintaining and designing the site to fit current browser statistics and metrics for our sites, as well as hitting target page weight and file size limitations. I also helped establish standards and processes for the Design Production Group while building and maintaining the production department's style guide. Here are two specific projects I handled while with ESPN.com:
- Page 2: Page 2 is the lighter side of sports, the irreverent, behind-the-scenes editorial look at what makes sports entertaining � anything from Mark Cuban's ideal dinner to who was hotter, A-Rod or Anna Kournikova.
Certainly, to keep a section like this fresh with the target audience, content needs refreshing each day. I originally designed the daily top-story and secondary logo graphics each weekday beginning at 6 a.m., when the editorial team hands off the day's content. I was responsible for being the creative vision for those stories, but only had three hours each morning to produce the page including the following:- Research the new stories
- Collect appropriate source materials from Associated Press and other resources
- Create a new top story feature illustration and headline
- Create additional graphic-intensive sections for the secondary features
Inside the Playbook: I created Inside the Playbook, animated football play diagrams on ESPN.com directed by former NFL quarterback Sean Salisbury, one of the first interactive Flash applications ever online. Previous animated plays had been done using custom Java applications created by expensive outside contractors. At the same time I was researching a new animation application on the market, FutureSplash. I was given the responsibility of researching alternatives and I opted to use the fledgling FutureSplash rather than Director to create these unique online features because FutureSplash was a bit more user-friendly to complement our available production artists' skill sets. During the time I was developing the first interactive models of Inside the Playbook, Macromedia bought the program and renamed it to what we know it as today, Flash. Using this new internet technology, I produced and directed up to eight highly involved Inside the Playbook plays each week.
