adidas presented HB Design with a challenging project. Build an on-line uniform builder that allows coaches and sales people to interactively design sports uniforms for a variety of sports, including football, basketball, and baseball. The application had to be easy to use, fun to use, and support a huge number of options for each type of uniform. And at the end, the application had to capture all of the user’s choices on a printable order form.

HB’s solution was a combination of Flash, web, and XML technology. The Flash technology provided a rich, visual environment for styling the different uniforms. Users could pick colors for various parts of the uniforms (tops, pants, side panels, piping, names, and numbers), change fonts, choose trim options; in short — they could fully design their uniform. The XML technology provided the means to easily add new uniforms to the system. The web technology, using DHTML, integrated all of the components and captured all of the user’s choices on an interactive web form. In addition to capturing user’s choices, the web portion also computed prices for the user to compare.

The result was a very rich and very powerful system for designing team uniforms.