One of the special projects that I worked on in early 2018 was a custom donation page for the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA. They were constructing a new building made from unique pieces of glass and had the idea to ask patrons to sponsor each panel.
It was very exciting and it I felt good about trying to help out a good cause. However, I was given less than a month to put something together.
The challenges were that we didn’t have many resource from the client and I also had to build this on top on our donation system as well as a seating system that accounts for locations an availability.
When I first got wind of this assignment, my initial thought was to use what I thought were 3D renderings of the building (since it didn’t exist yet) and map each of the panels to a ‘seat’ in our system. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get more renderings in time and being that I was working on everything myself from graphics (Photoshop), SVG vector mapping (Illustrator) and all of the coding, we didn’t have time to do this.
So we were left with some 3D renderings, which actually turned out to be photographs of a model, and some architectural plans. I tried to present the nicer 3D images first and narrow the selection by section. And then we used the architectural drawings to try to visually map the panel to the buttons. It may not be as intuitive as selecting a panel on the 3D images, but again, we didn’t have all of these at the time and I wouldn’t have been able to draw and map 900 unique shapes to our ‘seats’.
But overall, it came out pretty good considering the time constraints, limited resources and complexity of our systems. And most importantly, it was a success for the aquarium.
I still haven’t made it up there to see the new building in person, but I hear it’s beautiful.
So, if you’re in the area, it’s another thing to visit!
https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/pacificvisions/support/glassguild