Aaron L'Heureux

Out of Date

Aaron — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:49:52 +0000

As I am not currently looking for work (BU is great), I’ve gotten more or less lax in my updates. Lately I’ve been working on Adobe AIR for iOS, significantly more rich JavaScript interactions/experiences, ramping up to work on an iOS application, and preparing to write a complicated WordPress plugin providing third party data to numerous themes via shortcodes and templating. I’ll try to be back in the not too distant future to include these projects (and others not mentioned here) with the normal detail I typically give to each project.

I don’t think I’ll be updating my resume at this time.

BU Online Admissions Viewbook

Aaron — Mon, 02 May 2011 05:56:27 +0000

For the past six or so months, I’ve been involved in two large projects with the admissions department at BU – this is actually the second of the two, the first will be in a forthcoming post. The Viewbook is a key recruiting tool for the university, accepted students receive it as one of the primary pieces of collateral alongside an acceptance letter. The goal is to show just what can be done and what life is like at the university and to help solidify a decision. This year, the print publication was highly integrated with a web component, taking over parts of the admissions website but also including a custom, highly interactive piece.

The feature also appeared on the BU homepage for approximately two weeks. The homepage presentation is a simple Away3D scene animating in briefly and drawing attention to the content.

The grid contains a large collection of video content from various sources, utilizing the BUniverse player, and sample student schedules (a component from a previous edition of the viewbook). Content is categorized by student-centric topics such as Faculty, Dining & Housing, Student Life, etc. Each of the categories acts as a filter mechanism to highlight all of the squares relating to that topic.

Filtering can be activated by clicking one of the topic squares or using the fixed-position footer menu. This menu is slated to be hidden in the near future for mobile devices that do not support fixed positioning.

When scrolled to the bottom of the page, the filter menu tucks itself into the page to allow access to the footer.

Hovering over any of the squares that activates video/schedule content reveals a brief bit of teaser copy.

After clicking one of the squares, the grid slides down to reveal the video or schedule, a description, and a list of related content. The grid fades down except for the active video, and on hover fades up either the filtered selection or the entire grid if nothing is currently filtered.

BUniverse provides alternative content for devices not supporting the Flash Player that acts as a link to the actual YouTube hosted version of the file so it can play in a native application. The experience also works with JavaScript disabled. The grid is fixed to five items wide and when squares are clicked, the browser is redirected to a static page. The static pages, which can be an entry point via a search engine, redirect the visitor to the full grid with the video from the still page automatically opened via a hash tag on the URL.

I acted as the sole developer on this project with Jon Brousseau as the designer. The Admissions Viewbook is currently available live and as a short video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Research Magazine on the Homepage

Aaron — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 02:42:35 +0000

Trying to get caught up with past project news and actual projects. Here’s a shot of the research magazine piece on the BU homepage.

Annual Report on the Homepage

Aaron — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:05:17 +0000

A reduced version of the Flash on the actual Annual Report, some flying question marks and a quick teaser on hover.

BU Annual Report 2010

Aaron — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:52:34 +0000

Each year, BU publishes an annual report to update the community on the status of the university in various categories such as research, campus life, and financials. The publication features an accompanying website designed to coincide with the look and feel of the print pub. See my discussion on the 2009 Annual Report for reference. This year I created a new Flash introductory experience and all of the JavaScript functionality on top of a layout design by Scott Dasse.

A series of question marks fly from the center of the stage, hovering/interacting with them gives you quick links to each section, however more apparent navigation is always available on the site in the header and on interior pages as prev/next arrows that take you linearly from section to section. Hovering over the main question mark brings up a menu with some additional content, including a note from the President and an explanation of the rhetorical question marks. All of the 3D in this particular project use the built in Flash Player 10 3D APIs instead of Papervision.

Some straightforward CSS2/3 helps enhance small portions of the site such as the drop shadow and rounded corners on these popups.

Interior pages contain some introductory copy with some expand/collapse code included.

Videos/images are swapped with JSON requests off to the BUniverse embed service to quickly switch between videos without needing to embed all of them on the page at once. Additional touches of CSS3 such as rotation of text for a quiz for browsers that support it also exist.

See the site live or take a look at the quick video walkthrough below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BU Research Magazine 2010 Homepage

Aaron — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:33:15 +0000

Each year BU publishes a research magazine detailing the efforts of the university and its achievements in various fields. The magazine has an accompanying website housing all the content online for those who choose to read there. My job was to take the existing cover and implement an interpretation of the design (Scott Dasse) in Flash. The print cover is below:

The Flash translation randomly generates the order and speed of the different topics and simply moves them across the screen. Hovering stops the entire line a given topic is in and helps it to stand out.

See the Research Magazine cover live or check out a quick video capture below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bostonia – Kenya Feature

Aaron — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:08:52 +0000

The Kenya feature article was the cover article for the Winter-Spring 2010 issue of BU’s magazine, Bostonia. A videographer visited Kenya and shot an amazing collection of video relating to the article and it was decided that the presentation for the web would be an interactive video feature to accompany the text article. They linked back and forth between each other (article deep linking to a specific video and videos anchor-linking to a section of the article or the comments section).

The entire site always fills the browser window without forcibly adjusting its size and streams the videos from BU’s pair of Flash Media Servers. The opening Kenya visual was also featured on the BU homepage for almost a week with the video of the tea leaves playing live on the site. Bronwyn Hawkins is responsible for the design of both the text article and the video presentation. Check it out below or live at Bostonia.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BU scores two more noteworthy sites on eduStyle, one is COM

Aaron — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:58:19 +0000

College of Communications

Aaron — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:29:55 +0000

As a graduate from the College of Communications (COM), it was a privilege to work on the redesign. The old site was extremely dated and needed a big revamp.

The new design aimed to bring timely news/events, student/faculty/class work (in the form of COM Stories), and department information to the forefront, improve content organization and uniformity, and bring the site into the present. Here’s the new homepage:

The homepage banner is a semi-flexible tool that I created for the Metropolitan College (see it on their homepage) with a lot of customization with regard to visual presentation of the material.

The banner is present in four places on the COM site, driven by a single XML file to help performance caching. Each location can designate a different set of feature banners/headlines and it has a predefined set of styles to help keep different sections color adjusted to their section’s designated color. The other three locations are the three department pages (Mass Comm/AD/PR, Film & Television, and Journalism) and feature only COM stories from those disciplines. The banner also adjusts where it links to in order to filter COM stories by category.

COM Stories themselves are actually just news posts relying on a custom taxonomy of tags that separates them from standard news posts. Since BU is not yet utilizing WordPress 3, we do not have access to custom post types, but this got the job done just fine.

I created a plugin to handle the authors/entities that would be attached to different COM stories that allowed for multiple authors/entities per story and name/image/extra detail/description. That information is stored in a custom table and linked together with post metadata, utilizing a post metabox and a custom admin page under the posts section. The stories can feature video, photo, and audio content utilizing the BUniverse player or two shortcodes put together for audio clips (not currently supported on BUniverse) and photo galleries.

Interior pages have a variety of style options based on where the page lives in the navigation.

News & Events are also much more visually appealing/friendly:

All development of the theme, and any not-already-existing plugins was my role in this site. Design and most CSS by Ben Agoes. Watch the video below to see how everything comes together or visit the COM site that is live.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BU Takes Three eduStyle Awards for 2010

Aaron — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:25:56 +0000

Three sites built out of my office took home awards from eduStyle this year (both judged and people’s choice for both). Delightfully, I had a hand of varying degrees in all three:

I detailed the Annual Report site shortly after it launched, I’m still very, very proud of the map effect.

I just explained my involvement in BUniverse, which will be an ongoing commitment of maintenance, upgrades, and enhancements.

And the last, is International Programs. I added functionality to an existing concept for the homepage Flash presentation, struggling to tolerate ActionScript 2 as it went along (video playlists, flashy effects, Google Analytics event tracking) and also provided a very simple chromeless video player for internal pages to allow some pages to have video headers.

My office is very aware of eduStyle and appreciate the ability to keep up with what our peers in the industry are doing as well as receiving the full gamut of feedback from the community.