| For six months in 2000, I was fortunate enough to work at Stan Lee Media as a "Web Developer" for the Marvel Comics founder's independent foray onto the web. My duties were many and varied; basic integration led to Flash interface design, and somewhere along they way I began learning PHP. The unfortunate fate of the company, like so many startups that year, was sealed by some financial malfeasance on the part of the company's cofounder... but working for Stan Lee was one of the prouder moments in my Web Development career. I developed both the interface and the back-end for this component of the Stanlee.net web site, which was the first practical application I wrote using PHP.  The "E-Mail This Page to a Friend" page from the Stanlee.net web site. The metallic frame around the HTML form was created in 3D Studio Max by lofting a spline imported from Adobe Illustrator and rounding the edges.
Due to the extensive use of Macromedia Flash, complex table layout, and Cascading Style Sheets on the Stanlee.net web site, I was asked to create a JavaScript "Sniffer" script that would detect several key pieces of information: Browser Name (Netscape, Internet Explorer), Browser Version, and whether or not the Flash plugin was installed.  The screen presented to users with a pre-4.0 browser. As with the "E-Mail This Page to a Friend" interface, the metallic frame was created with 3D Studio Max. A similar page was presented to users without the Macromedia Flash plugin. Character artwork was done by company artists. The sniffer employed a combination of PHP and JavaScript to check each new browser accessing the site; 4.0 or later browsers with the Flash plugin received a cookie allowing them to go directly to the site on future visits. Using PHP alone would have been more desirable, but JavaScript was necessary to detect whether or not the Flash plugin is installed.
The Drifter was one of the original characters created for the Stanlee.net web site; visitors to the site could download and watch animated, serial "webisodes" for free. The producers realized that we would need more than a three minute flash animation every other week to retain an audience, and to that end a great deal of supplementary material was made available. I was charged with creating interfaces for The Drifter character biographies. Using copy provided by the writers and artwork provided by the animators, I incorporated everything into a Macromedia Flash-based interface, using ActionScript to handle the scrollbars and control transitions.
In addition to the character bios, I was responsible for organizing a galleries of "behind the scenes" material; preliminary sketches, storyboards, and other materials used in the course of production. For The Accuser, I used a 3D-Rendered metallic frame around the content on each page. In addition to the design and upkeep of the Stanlee.net web site, the Stan Lee Media web department (known as "Squnkwurx" within the company) was also responsible for exploring new technologies and developing new concepts. The so-called Mobile Web was a hot topic at the time, and for a brief time the company toyed with the idea of publishing an AvantGo channel. The project was eventually shelved, but these are some of the concepts I put together. The biggest challenge when designing content for the 160x160 pixel screen of older PalmOS devices is maximizing the amount of useful content in the space available. The added challenge when it came to implementing a Stanlee.net branded mobile site was to give it a streamlined, comic book look consistent with the main web site.  Two concepts for a Stan Lee Media PDA site.  The first concept was further developed and implemented as an actual AvantGo-friendly page. Another consideration was the fact that most PDAs can't display Flash movies, which were the chief attraction of the main Stanlee.net web site. The natural alternative was a "Comic Strip" format which could be sent to AvantGo as a series of panels turned 90 degrees to the right. The resulting left to right scroll when viewed on a PDA held sideways is more intuitive for reading content in this format.  Using stock characters from the shockwave Comics Composer application on the Stanlee.net web site, I layed out some panels which I then cropped and captioned in Adobe Photoshop. The colored version uses only web-safe colors for clean display on an 8-bit color or better PDA display, and the gayscale version is optimized for 2-bit displays. It was while working on this project that I came up with the idea for the Creating AvantGo Graphics with PHP tutorial I wrote for WebMonkey. This web page was generated from a DocBook XML source document using Saxon. [Printer-friendly Version] |
