Figure 10.1: WWW10 Logo
Music
Pentatonic gongs
Animation
This was one of the few logos that we had in vector form (a PDF). The globe outline was 40,000 lines of coordinates with 6-figure accuracy and we spent some time compressing this to under 500 points. We had decided to start from a map of Hong Kong (about 15000 points), zoom into the Conference Centre which is a clipped view of an actual photograph, zoom out and then contract the map of Hong Kong to a small circle in the position of Hong Kong revealing the globe as we do the contraction.
It was quite a problem early on getting the initial map to arrive just as the gong hit. The SVG drawing speed for all browsers was so slow that we were 1 second out at times. The solution we had for quite a while was to display an image of the map while the SVG was drawing. Luckily machine speeds eventually caught up with requirements.
The zoom is by a factor of 80 which would be difficult to achieve in Flash with its limited accuracy. We divided the Hong Kong area into 3 regions around the zoom point. The inner most region was drawn with several decimal places of accuracy while the outer part which is only visible at the start of the zoom was drawn with much lower accuracy. The path_ology library was used to perform the transformations.