Ashley Browning is available for work

After earning my stripes on Barclays online advertising creative, my role at Dare expanded to incorporate many of their other high-profile clients, including ITV, Sony and Sony Ericsson.

The banners I created for telecoms giant Vodafone were amongst my favourite though, and often took a few different approaches. There were times when executions were led by print and press advertising, so assets were already largely in place and simply required animating. Others, however, were online-only executions, and required illustration as well as animation.

The MySpace takeover was the first one to ever appear on the social networking site, and had to be personally approved by the MySpace CEO himself. We never told him that the profile pictures that comprised the bulk of the creative actually came from Facebook!

'Mobile Broadband - Finger' and 'Mobile Broadband - Warp' were two banners of the 'do-it-all-yourself' variety; illustration and animation. The USB dongle itself was re-created in Illustrator (barring the logo, of course) to shave value kilobytes from the total. 'Warp' utilised a clever shape-tweened movieclip which was duplicated, flipped and tinted multiple times in order to give the light-speed warp effect. I couldn't resist adding a personal touch in the game of Asteroids being played on the laptop - it seemed to fit in perfectly with the creative theme.

'Match' was an execution that took it's lead from print advertising but which nevertheless brought its own challenges in the digital space. Animating the flame and shadows was a tricky process of trial and error and a bit of tinkering to gain the desired result, but I feel it was well worth the extra time invested. The match itself does seem to exude a lot of character and diverse emotions throughout the short lifespan of the banner!

'Music' and 'Mates' were created using existing illustrations, leaving me with enough time to add in some subtle animated touches (such as the foot-tapping and the equaliser in 'Music'). 'Mates' was intended as an overlay execution, where the main challenge was convincingly animating the floating envelope.

Finally, the MySpace takeover was a long and complicated build that required all three banners to talk to each other accurately so that unsightly sync issues didn't crop up. The execution embedded here is the amalgamated version. The 'whirlpool effect' animation that appears on the screen of the phone was repurposed from an old Barclays banner that never say the light of day that utilises swirling molecules as its creative. I simply swapped out the molecules for profile pictures and shuddered the phone as they were loaded into it to create the visual metaphor of you taking your social connections with you wherever you go (something that is pretty commonplace these days, of course!).