Snert is a silver winner in the 2007 Summit Creative Awards! We won the award for our collection of accessible Flash activities and implementations.

The Summit Creative Awards recognizes and celebrates the creative accomplishments of small and medium sized advertising agencies and other creative groups with annual billings of $25 million or less. There were thousands of entries from 23 different countries, we won silver in the category for education. Winners were selected in categories that include print, broadcast, emerging media, online advertising, marketing materials, direct mail, political, corporate video, public service, best idea never produced, industry self-promotion and student competition.

Additional information about the International Summit Awards organization, its competitions and winning firms can be found on the Summit Awards web site at http://www.summitawards.com.

Today is the grand opening of the “Teach Me Energy!” site for Reliant Energy. The mini-site teaches children on the principles of energy. This site was developed in partnership with Raining Popcorn Media, a children’s book publisher in San Antonio. Snert Studios was responsible for the instructional design and animation of the Flash pieces. You can view the site here: www.reliant.com/TeachMeEnergy

The Reliant Lamp character was based on the character from the new Reliant commercials, in which a desklamp sneeks out of his house to the neighbors house, in order to plug into the wall to get some Reliant energy. Just like in the commercial, the lamp shines on the Reliant energy bill on the table. For the energy site, his nose was replaced with a special energy saving CFL bulb.

In the opening screen of the site, you can roll over many different kitchen appliances, and get energy saving tips and fun animations. You can access two activities, one is called “Who’s Bright Idea was That?” where you have to match up energy inventors with their inventions. Another activity is the “Fridge Art” activity, where you can make a drawing on different energy topics on the fridge.

We are currently working on adding more items to the site, including an exciting action game, so check back for more!

It’s out! Reliant Energy this week launched an advertising campaign with The Richards Group featuring “energy expert” appliances that secretly “come to life” and urge their owners to select Reliant Energy. You can read their press release here. We just saw it on TV the other day.

The kids mini site that we are developing is launching this Monday! One television ad features a lamp on a journey from its own home to a neighbor’s home in search of Reliant Energy as its electricity source. He hops across the street, in order to get to the neighbor’s house, where he plugs in the outlet in the wall, with a big sigh. Then he shines on a Reliant energy bill. We will be launching the website that goes with the commercials this Monday. Stay tuned!

We have just finished a project for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, that included making a series of interactive timelines, to go with their online textbooks.

We can’t show the whole timelines yet, until the books come out. The timelines are set up in Flash. The user can roll over the timeline, and select different time bubbles, that will open up an image and a piece of history on the timeline. The timelines are also set up to be accessible, so that a mobility impaired user who might not be able to use the mouse to scroll the timeline, can use the tab key to tab through the timeline bubbles as well.

Have you ever come across a tool that, once you start using it you wonder how you ever did without? The JSFL Flash Preloader Fix made by Grant Skinner is one of them. It’s such a time saver!

Ever have preloaders get stuck, because of event sounds or movieclips that are loaded into frame 1 of your movie? Hopefully in the new version of Flash there is a better way to export assets, but as of yet, you still have to export them manually into frame 2 of your movies. This script will do it automatically for you! You can download the script here.