Gareth Shapiro | London Based Flex / Air / Actionscript Freelance Developer & Trainer

At the end of 2008 I worked on a Flash project for The Economist called 'The World in 2009'. There was a graphic designer who was responsible for producing a world map vector and I wired it all up.

As you can imagine this artwork was intricate. Each country had a border and a background colour that were separate objects, some text fields for labels, and as you would expect also grouped into continents. The designer was using Adobe Illustrator to create the vector shapes and importing these into Flash and sending me the .fla

The process was not very smooth. There were changes to the artwork of course, Illustrator does not create MovieClips in the same way that you would manually and also when dealing with such an complex piece, old fashioned user error creeps in.

I have been using Google's excellent free Webmaster Tools to make sure that this blog is in good shape as far as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is concerned. One of the things I needed to improve were the description meta tags on each page but I could not find a plug in that would help me achieve this. So I wrote one myself and it is free for anyone who uses the Nucleus blogging system to use.

The World in 2009 is the 23rd edition of The Economist's annual collection of predictions for the year ahead—with views from journalists, politicians and business people.

This year's edition has two interactive online pieces looking at Countries and Industries in 2009. I was responsible for all the Actionscript and PHP coding.

I am bound by a non disclosure agreement from disclosing the client this Flex work was produced for and so the agency, Tribeca, is listed here against this item.

The brief was to produce a rich media interface for a section of a content learning system for use by a global pharmaceutical company. Tribeca, the creative agency, came up with a great solution that works so well it has been used by the marketing department when delivering presentations in addition to the main purpose of being an interface to learning material.

In 2001 I begun delivering Actionscript training through a number of London commercial training providers, something that I continue to do to this day.

Polonetworks is a global membership organisation and central agency to the polo industry.

In 2008 they launched a social networking website to enhance the services offered to their worldwide membership base.

The British Heart Foundation ran an anti smoking campaign on UK television that was based on depicting, in graphic detail, what can happen to the arteries of smokers, by showing cigarettes dripping with fat. It was tough viewing but the advert drove record numbers of visitors to the charity's website. In order to continue this message, creative web content was created to engage visitors and provide the final piece of a campaign that begun with posters on the street.

Producing television advertising is a global business. An advertising production company may have their office in London while needing to show a new script to a director who is on location in Hong Kong. It is exactly because of this type of situation that Stink decided to make their current in-house system an online application. Essentially this is business software that is accessed using a web browser and is available to staff wherever they may be, provided they have an Internet connection.

McCann Erickson Worldwide Advertising is a globally experienced worldwide agency network with offices in over 130 countries and more than 75 years of global experience.

Leveraging global resources, and tapping into local expertise, has earned the agency "Global Agency of the Year" honours for 1998, 1999 and 2000 from Adweek magazine.

McCann is a subsidiary of the Interpublic Group of Companies, one of the four holding corporations that make up the advertising industry.

Emco is named derived from the words 'Electrical Mechanical Company' and as such they are an all around Electrical-Mechanical Service Contractor aiming at the Gulf Market with Bahrain as a prime target. Emco specialises in the field of Electrical, Electronic, Refrigeration, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, Drainage, Fire Fighting and Maintenance work.

In 2008 I was asked to be involved in the construction of their new Content Management driven website.