In 2008, Rocketclowns created Ruben L. Oppenheimer’s official site, in Flash. For the time, it used some rather novel techniques, such as user controlled parallax, a 2.5D environment, and ambient sound design. We were awarded another FWA ‘Site of the Day’ for it, too. Yay!

Ruben was happy with his site, and didn’t feel anything needed to change for eight years. But in 2016, some of the political cartoons that were used in the site were no longer relevant, and he contacted us for an update. We discussed if we would either update his Flash site – coded in AS2! -, or do a future-proof complete overhaul to HTML5, that would also reach mobile devices, and would be easier to keep up to date.

Ruben went for the HTML5 version, and this is the result. Both Rocketclowns and Ruben are quite proud of how it turned out! We decided to archive the 2008-version, because we still like that one a lot too. It can be found at http://rubenoppenheimer.com/2008/

Adobe Animate CC, CreateJS, HTML, css, Javascript, Greensock GSAP, WordPress.

The development of this project went through several phases. We started building in Adobe Edge Animate. When Adobe decided to discontinue Edge , we felt that we couldn’t do a truely future-proof project using Edge. We switched to pure HTML / Javascript / css.

Then, Adobe rebranded Flash Professional to Animate, and we learned that it could export to HTML5 canvas using CreateJS. We knew that this was the ideal platform for Ruben’s project. We scrapped everything we had so far and rebuilt the project in Animate. It turned out to be the right decision. Building with Animate and CreateJS is a joy, especially when combined with the GreenSock Animation Platform. And canvas’ pixel-pushing performance is actually quite amazing.

Because Ruben wanted to keep parts of the site up to date by himself – such as his work and client portfolio – we created a super user friendly WordPress environment, with our canvas animations on top.

After the site’s launch, Ruben’s Facebook page exploded with awesome feedback.