I’m big into social media (Facebook, Twitter), and while you’re normally taught at a young age to not talk to strangers, I have met my fair share of good contacts and characters alike on these mediums.
One of these good contacts I’ve met runs his own graphic design business. He wad having some troubles with a Flash application he was working on, and I gave him a hand. I lent him some help a couple more times when he needed help, and after that he approached me about doing some Flash work for him.
The work was not anything that seemed too difficult for me, and it was for a company I knew well. Vogue Optical is a Canadian vision company that deals with lenses, glasses, etc. I knew the name so well from their catchy jingle and thought it would be a fun project to work on.
The project itself was a map that Gravista Graphics would design. I would set up the hit areas for the map, popping up the province that a user was hovering over if there was a Vogue Optical store in their province. I built an XML file from the excel spreadsheet that he sent me listing all the stores and their info. When clicked, the Flash would send the XML data for the selected province to the page through JavaScript and would list all of the stores using jQuery.
It was a fun project to work on, and someone I look forward to working with in the future!