Getting creative with screen savers

Flying toasters, Christmas lights, aquariums – most folks will recall the classic screen savers. These once ubiquitous features of desktop computing, while no longer required to avoid CRT screen “burn-in”, can still offer a colorful alternative to an otherwise static desktop.

From the serene to the obnoxious, screen savers exist to reflect almost every taste. But what if you wanted a screen saver with a specific message for a specific environment, say for instance, a company-wide or corporate-branded screen saver with a team-building message?

Enter the customized screen saver.

It’s an effective way to reiterate key corporate messages to your staff – employees return from lunch to find that an inspirational message graces the screens of their idling computers.

GE Healthcare Life Sciences recently commissioned us to produce a screen saver for their internal network. The screen saver was one of several communication pieces we produced to help roll out new corporate benchmarking and achievement guidelines internally.

It needed to communicate the company’s high-level strategy, business ethics, values and goals. The deliverable would be an .scr file, ultimately installed by the client’s IT department.

A customized screen saver for the Windows environment can be achieved in several ways. One simple approach would be to install a slide-show screen saver which plays a series of still images from the destination of your choosing. This offers limited creative control over features such as animation and text.

For a more sophisticated option, which allowed us to adhere to GE Healthcare’s visual brand guidelines, we created the animation in Adobe Flash CS4 and then converted the resulting .swf file to an .scr file.

The approved concept included a collection of real photos from recent corporate events, meetings, parties and workshops, delivering a blend of fun and work moments. We thought this was a great way to tie dry corporate messages to personal and relevant imagery that would hold employees’ attention. We used as many photos as possible in a variety of creative presentations.

After a few rounds of photo selection, script and storyboard reviews we started layout and animation. Consideration was given to the timing of the screen saver. Our initial version moved quickly through images at about a minute in length. Our client asked us to slow it down a bit. After considering the function of the screen saver – as something that will be observed casually and linger on screens for several months – we stretched the length to two minutes.

Upon approval, we researched file converters to find the best tool for converting to an .scr file. Googling “screen saver makers” or “screen saver editors” yielded a variety of results, not all of which were helpful. Software for creating screen savers has been around for a while and apparently so have some of the company websites on which they are hosted.

Dated landing pages representing mysterious companies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more current authors. After some trial and error we settled on Instantstorm 2.0 as the solution for our .scr conversion. The software installed smoothly on one of our Macs with Parallels Desktop running Windows XP and using Instantstorm’s intuitive interface we were able to produce our client’s screen saver.

The installation on the client side isn’t complete yet. If we have any learnings from that process, we’ll be sure to share.

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