Created a splash page for the Wizard101 site. The marketing team felt that users were being overwhelmed when coming to the website for the first time. I worked with them to establish a new look for users visiting the site for the first time.

The imagery was picked to connect with the television commercial, the most likely thing that users would have seen before coming to the site. The crystal ball animation was put together in Flash. The images that fade in are animated with the script.aculo.us javascript package.

Because it was so important to to have the crystal ball loaded immediately on the page, I divided it into two separate files: the base crystal ball and all the cloud and lighting effects. The base is a teeny 1Kb so it appears immediately even on very slow connections. Once the base is loaded it loads in the effects file while the rest of the page loads in. The effects file is larger but still pretty small, 79Kb. I got quite a lot of mileage from a few png's created in Photoshop and combined in many, many different ways for a bunch of different clouds. Everything else in the file is vector art created in Flash. The original was much cloudier and had a more intense feel going on (which I prefered) but it was ultimately decided to tone it down and leave the text much more visible when the mouse wasn't over it.

Once the user has clicked through to the main site, a cookie is set to make sure that they don't have to pass through the splash page again.

View the splash page (you may have to clear your cookies)