In 1999 I made my first web-page...it was to advertise some antenna balls I made that looked like Darth Maul (the Jack-in-the-box "Jack" balls were a huge fad at the time). I thought that the sole fact of having a web-page would send my sales through the roof. I even spent hours making a stupid animation in a program that extended microsoft paint.

The way I manufactured the balls was this:
1. Ordered "blank" white styrofoam antenna balls from an antenna ball company (I ordered a full 100 to start with)

2. Spray painted the balls black on sticks in my back-yard.

3. I worked at a sign company at the time, so I used some scrap red vinyl and programmed our plotter to cut out the unique stickers with the Maul red paint pattern (some would argue that he's red with black tattoos, but the red area is smaller so I made that the sticker)

4. Stuck the stickers onto the black balls using a hot blow dryer to heat up the vinyl so the flat shape would conform to the round balls.

5. I bought a bunch of yellow toothpicks and hot glued them into the ball heads for the maul horns. I let the hot glue kind of build up around the insertion holes so it would look more gnarled like his real horns.

6. I hand-painted yellow dots into the center of the red eye stickers.

7. Since the blank balls came without noses, I got some high-strength foam and hand cut out triangle noses that I superglued into the balls (after spray painting them black)

8. I made up collector cards in paint shop pro and had them printed on heavy paper at kinkos.

9. I bought a kitchen vaccum/heat sealer (the freshlock turbo II) and used normal zip-lock bags to put the ball and collector card together in a nice store-looking package. (I cut off the zip lock part of the baggies so it looked like a normal heat seal you'd see in stores)

My Maul-Ball venture didn't pan out in the end (though I did sell enough to pay for the heat sealer), maybe it was the numerous trademark infringements, the fact that I hand-assembled all the balls, or the fact that, by the time the balls were delivered to me and assembled, Darth Maul just wasn't that cool anymore, and the Jack Balls were even less-so.

But I'm still proud of having finished off my initial vision and the web-page and animation were the early seeds of my current interest in flash.

FUN FACT: I attended a Star Wars premier and sold the balls to the kids waiting in line!

See the webpage here: http://tatooine.fortunecity.com/zenith /261/

Here is a picture of all the supplies together: