Background

Group GSA is one of the world’s leading Architectural & Design firms. They’ve designed everything from sporting venues for the Sydney and Beijing Olympics, Hilton Resorts, public buildings and are responsible for some of the world’s most design forward workplaces. Internetrix was approached by Group GSA based on our previous work with a leading architectural firm.

Challenge

With such a rich pedigree in design spanning 30 years and over 2000 projects, Group GSA needed a website that would showcase their award winning designs and also provide them with the flexibility to self manage their content. This called for a flash intensive site, however, the creation of a self managed flash site isn’t a simple task, and whilst many web developers can create an eye catching flash site, the ability to self manage via a Content Management System (CMS) is often lost. It is also quite difficult to get Google Analytics (or any other web analytics software) to track Flash sites. With Group GSA’s discerning eye for design, Internetrix really had to produce a highly creative and advanced site.

Internetrix Solution

The creative process for Group GSA was quite extensive due to the discerning nature of the client, the emphasis placed on the design and their hands on approach with the project. As an architectural firm, Group GSA was more concerned with the look and feel of the site as it was designed more as an online portfolio than a typical business website. It was therefore important to get a sleek finish using Flash.
Because Group GSA wanted to update their website with photos of new and upcoming projects as well as associated text, Internetrix had to adapt Freestyle (our CMS) to collaborate with a Flash website.
Internetrix adapted Freestyle into a more flexible package for Group GSA with a focus on image flexibility. Whilst Freestyle has the ability to resize images, the highly interactive nature of the Group GSA site meant that images had to be cropped in a particular fashion to ensure the features of Group GSA’s projects weren’t obscured. Because Group GSA provided the skill set to crop and resize images internally Freestyle had to be smart enough to accept pictures of varying sizes whilst still allowing for the Flash movements. Internetrix developed Flash to determine picture movements based on size.

Because of the changing nature of the images on the site, text had to be appropriately placed depending on image. Therefore text wasn’t applied in a regular html template format, but rather Freestyle was customized to allow varying positions for text based on the picture.

The end result is shown below.