Mapping Colonial America

Open gallery
This is an aged project, but I still really love it. It’s an award-winning online exhibit, built in Flash, that provides a showcase for Colonial Williamsburg’s collection of antique maps. An interactive timeline and zoom feature allow for in-depth learning. CDs were also produced for retail sale with an additional “Compare to Modern Map” feature.
Awards: 2006 Official Honoree of Annual Webby Awards, International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences; 2006 Gold Award, W³ Awards; 2005 Outstanding Website WebAward, Web Marketing Association
- Roles
- Art direction
- Design
- Structure coding (Flash)
- Scripting functionality (ActionScript2)
- Technologies
- Flash
Highlights
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Rich design
It may be a bit crowded compared to today's standards, but back then it was fairly standard. The deep red contributes to a sense of history while the pop-out map highlights the current feature.
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Integrated navigation and timeline
Using lots of fun, custom ActionScript, I created a drag-and-drop timeline. Once dragged-and-dropped, the historical text timeline and the active map animate to the same date, and vice versa. All of the animation in the exhibit was done using ActionScript.
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Preset zoom inset into text
Using Zoomify, I was able to provide inline links to view parts of the map referenced in the text.