"Jam3Media had the good sense to create a quick-loading, non-self-indulgent site that allows users to look through its work quickly and intuitively." —juror Toria Emery

"A fun and fluid fat-bit representation of their work." —juror Britt Miura

Overview: This showcase for a Toronto-based interactive studio, specializing in producing Flash and database-driven sites, can't help but attract the attention of designers, Flash coders and creative directors. Looking for a non-standard way of viewing work led to the creation of a funky, tile-shuffle interface concept of portfolio pieces and client names—correspondingly, the Tetris concept was born.

• An HTML version keeps Jam3Media at the top of Web search results.
• PHP loads one 60KB mosaic image instead of 100+ .5KB files.
• The tile shuffle in The Team spells a name then creates a photo.
• The site's received 60,000 unique views and 455,000 page views.

Comments by Adrian Belina:
What was the most challenging aspect of this project?
"Our initial challenges were met during concepting. We all know that when you love what you do, it resonates in your work; we also know that impressing fellow multimedia enthusiasts is a daunting task. That said, we really had only handful of requirements: the first was to come up with a concept that wasn't just pretty but showed off our creativity and technical skills; second, we wanted to ensure that we could build it in a month so client work wouldn't be disrupted; and third it had to be scalable and dynamic."

Did you learn anything new during the process? Part of development involved creating our own font, so we created another Flash application to author the font data representing all characters. There were initial concerns with the server loading the 100+ portfolio tiles (each under 1K); it ignored serving the small files randomly and consistently stalled in the loading phase. We created a workaround solution using PHP to create one giant mosaic JPEG and had Flash dynamically slice the tiles for us."

What would you do differently if you could start the project over? "We're extremely pleased with our site, but if we had to do it again, we'd do it entirely differently—so we could come up with something equally innovative."