Aeria Games – Website, Games, and Video Ads
Developing the Website
One of the challenges at Aeria Games was trying not to go too overboard with design. Many of the games we featured were already graphically rich, which meant that creating a simple but exciting portal was the first theme that crossed our executive team. My first thought was drawing inspiration from the XBox. The console itself appears light, friendly, and compact. My goal for our site was to hopefully gain that same expectation from our users. The wireframes carefully divided platform and genres. The main kicker was developing an aesthetically pleasing hero space. Using After Effects, we carefully layered movie clips on top of background images while still keeping the file size down to help streaming.
Role: Lead UI/UX designer. Visual Designer.
The 50k Limit
In 2010, creating visually appealing video ads was a difficult task with only a 50k limit and a standard set of ad unit dimensions. One of the ways we bypassed this problem was to create a SWF with a transparent PNG that streamed a video from our CDN. The result allowed us to 15-30 videos while submitting a SWF who’s file size was less than 50k. The result was a 12% increase in CTR compared to a static ad or Flash animation.
Role: Lead UI/UX designer. Visual Designer.