This Flash-based portfolio website showcases advanced interactive design techniques that align with modern expectations for responsive, immersive user experiences. The Alaskan landscape, captured during the summer solstice using a Nikon D70, was carefully stitched from eight separate photos into a seamless panorama. These were divided into foreground, midground, and background layers, creating depth and realism. Imported into Flash, the layers used custom parallax scrolling, enabling a dynamic experience driven by user input.

The project stems from a larger body of work begun in 2003 with my early carousel and scrolling experiments, which introduced mouse-driven navigation and depth-layering to web design. By 2007, these techniques evolved to incorporate elements like alpha channel masking, randomized animations, and lens flare effects. This timeline reflects a pivotal period in the evolution of user interfaces, bridging static, single-input designs and today’s dynamic, multi-input systems.

The interface included randomized cloud animations, which moved behind the hills, and a dynamically rotating lens flare that adjusted its position and opacity to create the effect of natural lighting. Alpha channel techniques were employed to mask the Flash embed itself, allowing portions of the background HTML texture to show through. For example, the footer text "//////ayeckel.com//" was designed as a transparent layer, seamlessly blending with the visual scene. Navigation elements, such as "Contact" and "Resume," floated above the scene while allowing the parallax layers beneath to remain visible, demonstrating an innovative use of layered transparency that still feels modern.

The interaction design extended beyond aesthetics, focusing on functionality that bridges traditional mouse-based inputs and modern touchscreens. The scrolling behavior, originally designed for mouse movement, trans