Case Study

Project objectives:
Showcase the photographic work of Ted Grambeau with the objective of further commercialising his skills and services to the publishing, creative and advertising industries.


How the project achieves these objectives:
www.tedgrambeau.com showcases galleries in an large and uninterrupted view while punctuating Ted's unqiue and straight-forward attitude to travel, adventure and fashion. Custom folio export (in PDF format) provides Art Directors and editors fast and effective folios of
Ted's work customised to their individual needs.


Target market:
Primary target audience is art directors, photo editors and publishers seeking commercial photography.
Secondarily, the site's back-end provides highly organised management of images and image data for storage and distribution -
perfectly suited to the photographer and agencies.


How the project meets the target market requirements:

• Large and easy view of images galleries and captions.
• Tailor a custom folio and export in PDF format for ready-use in client presentations or for on-selling Ted's work.
• Scope the breadth of Ted's journey around the globe through the Travels section - link to galleries attached to destinations.
• Purchase prints, posters or books from the online store.
• See behind-the-scenes action and Ted's committment to getting capturing action, fashion or adventure when we launch the
• PodCasts soon to come...

Key creative aspects of the project:
Two words: Simplicity and elegance.
Site design and Flash development ensure at all times that images are displayed with purity and sensibility.


Unique technical features and how these contribute to its success:
The core ruby-on-rails application makes extensive use of JQuery to provide a simple interface for managing and editing large collections of images.
All image processing tasks are offloaded to Airbrush, our open-sourced distributed image processing server. This uses the memcached/Starling libraries to pass the image and job requirements into a queue for manipulation by a dedicated image engine.

The end result is fast, scalable and fault-tolerant image handling. We have also built an Adobe Air tool that provides a drag-and-drop based, os independent desktop application for seamlessly uploading batches of images.

Additional custom libraries include a geo-parser for converting decimal degrees to Mercator meters and our pdf generator, based on the Prawn ruby library. Integration with the front-end flash application is provided through a RESTful API, making it trivially easy to adjust/alter and enhance the front end independently of the back-end setup and vice-versa.


Usability and accessibility measures taken:

• Deep linking of pages
• Large and clear text throughout
• Intuitive interface and navigation
• Drag and drop (within PDF generator)

Particular features or path to highlight:

Path one:
www.tedgrambeau.com
+ / browse the default gallery left or right / click to open info button at lower screen / click to close info button at lower screen

Path two:
+ / Navigate to PDF Gallery / Select gallery / drag images / Create PDF

Path three:
+ / Travels / Mapping / Hawaii / Browse Galleries

System requirements for your entry:
Flash 9, all browsers.