Hitachi
Expandable Banners
Hitachi is a client of Campbell-Mithun, which is a client of Creative Art Solutions, which is a client of mine. By way of this food chain the task to create the banners fell onto my plate. The project started out innocently enough: a set of banners of various dimensions. At some point the request for a set of expandable banners was sent along so that the ads could be featured on Forbes.com and the Wall Street Journal's site WSJ.com. These banners are open when the page first loads, then they close up and reveal some news article behind. This doubles the ad space...at least temporarily.
In the first few attempts I used JavaScript and two static images for the top and bottom pieces. Then the pieces were Flash animations. This was okay but not perfect. Then I figured I could do it all in Flash if the background was transparent. This was the most elegant option, so that the 360 x 560 expandable banners slid back into the standard large rectangle size of 336 x 280.
Sample Banners
Expandable 336 x 560
Standard 468 x 60
There were three simultaneous campaigns to highlight some of Hitachi's achievements. Small Wonder is the company's tiny Mµ-Chip, which is about the size of a grain of sand and thinner than rice paper. It's generally used for storing crucial data in tiny places. Global Vision promoted the company's diverse interests and futuristic concepts, and Inspiration Highway seemed to be a generally positive outlook on the future. We didn't really do much for for the latter, but banners for the former came out beautifully.
GIFs and JPEGs
As a backup for Flash banners, GIFs and JPEGs will always be in required. So I developed some simple animated GIFs based on the same designs, but they're pretty boring compared to the Flash banners so I'm not going to waste any more time discussing them. You can see them on the 468x60 page.
HITACHI 160x600s