How to explain this...
One of the sites I'm involved with supporting at UGA is the Managed Software Distribution site. The end of fiscal year is coming soon, which always necessitates early warning. There's always a mad rush to spend end-of-year funds before they disappear for good, but MSD can't take in money past a certain date or they end up losing money just like everyone else. So, they have a cutoff date beyond which they want everything to go to the next fiscal year. In order to call attention to this they wanted to have something on the homepage that people couldn't miss. Ultimately, we ended up with the graphic you can see here.
This is the kind of thing designers (at least ones like me) hate, but it does get your attention, which I guess is the point. And just ignore the image on the left. That's a whole other post that I'll refrain from getting into now.
Anyway, we only arrived at the current animated gif after a couple of other options that were discarded. The folks at MSD passed along a different animated gif that looked fine by itself, but being red and in a serif font clashed horribly with the rest of the site. The first file they wanted to use was an even more ucky (yes, "ucky") flash movie. However, it was not nearly as obnoxious as it could have been (turn up your sound to get the full effect).
Posted by Jason at April 8, 2005 07:57 PM