Communication Arts Interactive Annual
Communication Arts has released their Interactive Annual featuring some of this years best design on the web. The two winners that stand out the most in my eyes are Veer in the business category and Churchill And The Great Republic in the info design category. Veer is quite deserving of the honor for their elegant advertising, intuitive shopping process, and overall excellence in delivering an enjoyable, inspiring user experience. Their sales pitch is never gimmicky, its just useful information, and useful products. They are one of the few online businesses (besides Threadless) whose marketing is transparently suspended in a dedicated community of people who love design. Oh, and their design ain’t bad either.
Master story tellers Terra Incognita are the designers of Churchill And The Great Republic, yet another thoughtfully conceived project in their impressive portfolio. Their work is the gold standard for the successful integration of media to deliver complex stories that somehow seem so simple. They create passive paths through their content where a viewer can sit back and be entertained, or hop off the trolley at any point to investigate things more closely. Bart Marable, the humble genius who founded the company in 1995 and steers the ship as the creative director, was previously a guest lecturer at The Art Institute of Atlanta where I teach, and left quite an impression with the students and faculty in the Interactive Media Design department as a master of his craft yet modest and ready to share. It’s refreshing to encounter such a successful designer that hasn’t become drunk on his own ego. His articles about interactive story telling are great.
There are many more quality selections in the Communication Arts Interactive Annual from which to gain inspiration. The common theme in all projects is that concept drives great design.
Oh my those tabs on the Veer website are just so nice, almost a focal point. It is really interesting how they created the illusions of lines from the tab to the content of the page when it is really broken by the content right below the tabs. It gives dimension at the same time it differentiates information. Nice.
November 3rd, 2006 at 1:06 amI chose the following site to make some comments on.
http://www.mcartdenver.org/#
First of all I love this site. I enjoy the openness and the urban feel. The orange colors that are used for everything on the foreground works so well because of the imagery in the background that is just grey and white excluding the figures, which take up hardly any space.
One of the first things you notice when scrolling the navigation is that instead of changing the color or anything, they simply change the transparency, This is a very nice touch. Right below the navigation is the title of the page. This layout is very strange and different. Surely someone behind this with some typography skills. There is a slope effect from the navigation to the bottom of the site title, it is all the same color, all the same font and the only thing that separates it is a small space and larger font. Why does this work??? I had to question this, cause visually it is one of the first things your eyes are drawn too, yet they do not get confused, you know what is what. I think the orange bold line on the left side of the navigation really helps with separating that. It is an element that seems to have relation with the navigation just because they fall on the same horizontal space. That is a very nice touch. When moving down to the title you know it is the title just because of the size of the text. This works so well, it makes me envy of the fact that I cannot think of simple things like that sometimes.
If you click on “new building” you are taken to another section of the site, which still leaves you on a section of the large picture in the background. You have 2 extra sets of links that show up, what I would call a horizontal sub nav and then a 3rd level nav vertically. This to me seems a little confusing for some reason but I guess it shouldn’t be. I understand it after looking at it a minute, but it was not intuitive immediately.
The other thing about the navigation is that the main navigation does not tell you which one you are located under. There is no active state for any of those, only for the second level. The third level does not even have any.
Outside of these few little navigation quirks I think the site is excellent. One of the nice things about it is its simplicity. Yet at the same time a sense of complexity comes out of it at times, like the transition between sub navigation links.
This site has no gradients, shadows, or other web 2.0 trends, it just stands on its own and works well if you take each element of it away and imagine it without that element. You take away the background and the typography and layout hold up on their own, without the help of any boxes at that.
Great website.
November 8th, 2006 at 12:39 am