Give Them What They Want

For the consumer, a screen saver is a form of expression or something that satisfies a personal interest. For you, it’s a billboard delivering 24/7 impressions. Remember if you don’t give them what they want, your billboard will be gone in seconds.

What do consumers want?

They want a saver that expresses the affinity they have for the brand. They want something fun and useful.

The saver has got to say…

I like to have fun. This movie was great. My Employees need this information. This is relaxing. I think this looks cool. I like fast cars.

They don’t want boring product shots, spinning logos, and slogans.

Tabasco is a brand with attitude. Tabasco aficionados see themselves as daring, irreverent individuals. Brand loyalists eat it and wear it. With this in mind, Brad Brewster, Creative Director of Bent Media, designed several screen savers for McIlhenny's that are fun and kinda crazy -- zany cajun characters dance on and off the screen, things catch on fire, you hear zydeco music and there is a quiet Tabasco presence. More than 500,000 users have downloaded the Tabasco screensavers, with an equal number estimated to have passed screensavers on to friends virally.

If your product is car parts, your customer probably wants fast cars not u-joints and manifolds.

If your client is Herbal Essences Shampoo, getting a customer to download a screen saver may seem like a stretch. However, if the saver is beautiful, soft, fragrant (almost literally) and revitalizing, chances are the product’s target audience will love it. If you make their computer prettier and more feminine, who knows, they may tell two friends who will tell two friends, etc. Oops that’s someone else’s slogan.

Keepin’ It Interesting

How Much Content Will You Need

In general, you won’t sit and watch a saver play over and over and over again. You tend to look at them on and off for a few seconds at a time throughout the day while you are on the phone, walking by a cubicle, or talking to a co-worker. If you have one minute or more of content in your saver, your saver will stay interesting.

Randomize Behavior

Some screen savers look great the first time through but get old after playing for awhile. Try and figure out a way to make your saver random or appear random. Run it on your machine for a few days and see whether you get tired of it.

One way to accomplish this goal, is to make objects appear, disappear, move, and scale randomly with ActionScript.

Our dragonfly screen saver is a simple example of this strategy. In this screen saver, dragonflies buzz across the screen at random speeds and sizes giving the effect of being very near or very far away.

Slide Shows

Slide shows are the simplest form of screen saver. If you are creating a slide show saver, have at least a dozen photos playing at five seconds intervals. Even if your images don’t play in random order, with a one minute loop and 12 images, the brain will tend not memorize the sequence.

If you can, refresh your slide show periodically by pulling new, consistently themed images from the web.

Our Twelve Pictures of Tibet screen saver demonstrates this concept.

Animation Loops

If you are making a saver from serial animation, consider creating 5 or more small serial animations that play in random order. If you use one long serial animation, the brain tends to remember the story and it can get old.

Check out our Halloween saver to see this idea in action.

Keep Your Branding Subtle

If the saver is just a spinning logo, it wouldn’t last long on the user’s computer and has zero viral potential.

In the Herbal Essences example no customer will care what their logo or slogan is – keep them small, they will be noticed. They want to see soft, good smelling things.

In the end, it’s far more important to make a saver that lasts, than one that hits the user over the head with a branded message once and is immediately deleted.

Drive Web Traffic

A screen saver can be the front door to your website. If you have information that changes on a daily basis and your user your wants it -- i.e. news story, newsletter, weather report, stock price -- embed it into your screen saver with links to the online source page.

Updateable Content

Monitor Resolution and Scaling

If you are using non-vector content like JPEG images, give some consideration to how they will appear at different monitor resolutions. Flash does not scale JPEGs well so you might consider making your stage a size that shows your images at their best. You can turn scaling off by including a FSCommand(‘allowscale’, ‘false’) in your first frame before your images are visible.

Our Twelve Pictures of Tibet screen saver does just this.

File Size

If you are planning to offer the screen saver for download, consider it’s download time and the load this activity will put on your server.

Generally speaking you can make a great screen saver in less than 2Mb. On most sites having a 4Mb download is still not that big of a deal but remember that takes awhile to download it using a dial-up connection.

If you are distributing your saver via a CD, your saver can be almost any size.

Optimizing Playback

If you plan on having sound in your screen saver, include an on/off control. Screen savers that play sound can be inconvenient and annoying at times. Our setting window does have a mute check box but you may want to create a prefs window accessible from the screen saver itself that contains a sound control. Another option is to assign a key to toggle the sound on and off.

User Customization

Screen savers can be more useful or fun if the user can customize it.

Our Moon Cow saver is a silly example of this idea. The user can control the size of the cow’s udder by adjusting a control in the Settings Window. ScreenTime for Flash has special functionality that enables the Settings Window SWF to share data with the Saver SWF.

Another example of a screen saver with user customization is BlogSaver. This screen saver by Smashing Ideas was designed to keep Flash users on the tip by displaying the web logs of top Flash designers and evangelists. BlogSaver allows users to pick which blogs they want to follow.