Interactive Halloween e-card.
Carve your pumpkin online and send it to your friends!

release date: 19 Oct 2005 size: 368 Kb (main file)
requirements: Macromedia Flash 7 or higher


How it was done

The initial idea was to make something fun for Halloween. Replicating a pumpkin carving experience in Flash sounded good, mostly because it was technically challenging to implement. Trying to make it look realistic was our goal.

After some trials and extensive coding, the main engine was done (implemented as a class, it grew nearly 1000 lines of code at the end). All that was left to do was to implement the engine into a nice interactive Halloween ecard.

The process involved photography, interface design, picture editing, sound recording, music composition, and even carving a real pumpkin. Altogether it took a month from start to finish.

Launched a little less than two weeks before Halloween, the card became very popular and within a week it had spread all around the web.



* C|Net, Design Interact, Macromedia, CNN are registered trademarks.

The results:

Despite low initial traffic, in just a few days thousands and thousands of our Halloween ecards were created and sent to other users.

Despite all the technology "under the hood", the card is easy to use. We spent much of our time making sure the carving-process was simple and intuitive. We also reduced the file size to allow for slower internet connections, optimized the code so it runs well on slower computers, and added a rich level of graphical detail. In the end, the main advantage of our ecard was a great sense of humor that perfectly captured the spirit of Halloween.

In the end it all paid off. The Halloween ecard was mentioned on websites like Cnet.com, About.com, received a number of web awards, including the Macromedia Site of The Day (10/28/2005). It was even mentioned on TV, in CNN's Headline PRIME news (Friday, 10/28/05).

By Halloween our traffic had jumped by 1600%, compared the first day or release. Users were very diverse - from children and students, to grandparents and professionals. In the end they all had one thing to share - the spirit of Halloween. And we are happy we helped them with that.

For additional information and to "make your message fun" please feel free to contact us.

You can also read: Interactive eCards as a viral marketing tool