INSPIRE is a online publication from the Adobe Experience Design Team which provides some interesting reading and good video content.
Someone’s done a great job of the skinning and styling of this Flex app! It looks beautiful, understated and professional.
On the downside it does feel a clunky here and there though and its still makes use of those nasty ‘scroll by renderer’ default Flex lists.
Viking Penguin Book Club is a beautiful site and works like a dream
Solid design and layout, crisp clear typography, nice quick transitions that add to the feel or the site without getting in the way, and a touch of 3D and and browser history. Great job by Freedom Interactive! Wonder if the dynamic content is indexed by search engines as well?
How insane is Seadragon!
Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network…
…Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
Transitions are smooth as butter.
Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.
And the demo implimentation of it in Photosynth (Windows only) is mental too.
…takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.
TED Talk Seadragon & Photosynth Demo
Both stunning projects!
Fingal is a great looking site, but the usuability really hasn’t been thought about and it isn’t built that well. I don’t understand how this site made it onto FWA?
If you in an area of a Flash site, you shouldn’t be able to click on the navigation to show that area again. The navigation should clearly show hats the area your in, and the button on the navigation should be disabled. On Fingal if you click on ‘About us’ and let the transition in, you can the click on ‘About Us’ again. The section will transition out, and then back in again. Why would you want this to happen???
If a site has been developed well you shouldn’t have to disable the menu in between transitions. Its a cheap solution to just disable all navigation when a movie is transitioning. I much prefer to see that the transitions are managed well so that at any point in any transition if the user selects another area the movie is able to cope with the users selection.
Finally the news sections shows the text ‘deafaultValue’? Try clicking on ‘News’ and letting the section transition in. Now click on any other area and the text display in the news feed shows ‘defaultValue’. Not very professional at all.
It’s disappointing to me to find such a low attention to usability, when so much detail has gone into the design and illustration. It also disappointing to see that this is listed on FWA ,when in my opinion it is a pretty poor site. A site that works crap, but looks good, is crap.
I came across Design Charts today. It lists to top 40 websites each week by aggregating other sites that list awarded websites.
At the moment its only aggregating 5, and not what I consider to be the main listing site of this kind, Favourite Website Awards, but its a great idea and quite a nice site in itself.
This young design consultancy just down the road from me have a great clear and efficient, minimal site.
They also have some really nice products. Someone get me one of those ‘Surface’ armchairs.
One day I’ll have the time and money to get back into product design!
Happy Birthday Flash!!!
Today Flash is officially 10 years old and to celebrate, yesterday FWA, in conjunction with Adobe, announced a community poll to establish what the most influential Flash site has been in the last 10 years.
10 Years of Flash. Make sure ya get your votes in.
10 Ways has some really interesting stuff. It’s a collaboration between Getty Images and 5 leading designers/agencies to create 10 interactive experiences that explore visual language.
Andries Odendaal’s pieces are definately my favourites. Both create a random way to view a gallery of images, but remain really nice to interact with. light is a 3D space built of images. You can move round this space to focus on individual images. information displays an image. Clicking on an area of this image will zoom in to reveal smaller images that you can then zoom into again. Zooming into different areas of color affect the following images that are shown.
Loving the idea behind transformation by Great Works as well.
It’s really worth looking at the other works by Less Rain, The Barbarian Group and Tomato.
This is a fantastic site of reportage photography made up of interactive essays with audio tracks and graphics.
There’s some great essays there, the lastest title ‘Chernobyl Legacy’ is particularly well done and thought provoking.