Sat Jun 1, 2002
In 2002 I was asked to create a complex website for a closet design company in Mallorca. The idea was to build an on-line tool for designing closets. This tool would be used by employees in front of customers visiting their shops, and directly by customers at home over the Internet. This was one of the most complex projects I’ve finished. It took me six months.
Unfortunately after it was finished the owner of the company changed, and the new owner was not interested in having a web page at all. The project included:
- The corporate website which I designed.
- The back office which allowed a complete follow up the process, from design to construction and invoicing. It was possible to enter all kinds of materials, sizes, prices based on ranges… gives me a headache just to think about it :)
- On line Flash/ActionScript design tool. It allowed designing both inside and outside of the closet, including drawers, shelves, bars, divisions, sizes, walls, materials, doors. Rules defined conditions of what’s allowed in a design and what not. Simple key short cuts allowed creating designs fast. The whole Flash tool was only 23 Kb. Did I mention I like optimizing? :)
- I created a 3D rendering server using Flash, PHP and POV. Photographic quality and lower rendering times were tested using radiosity and a more powerful PC, but the client was not interested. I built this server concept in such way it could be installed in many computers, even home computers with non permanent Internet connection, a bit like SETI at home. Computers would ask the main server if there were pending renders to do, and if there were any, the information would be downloaded, the image rendered, and sent back to the server.
- Printing of closet details: dimensions, materials, and the 3D image. This print out would be used for constructing the closet. The page design was done using ActionScript for precise layout and font control, as opposed to HTML which gave unpredictable and limited results.