Simple, but cool website of Sydney based studio Design is Kinky. Showcase of their work laid out big and bold – you move around panning your view of the work – which provides a nice colourful overview of their work. I like the large imagery and layout it gives a good impression of the kind of work they do, nice and simple, but with a twist, cool.
Brazilian site promoting Banana Cafe clothing. Using the newspaper visual metaphor to display the range of clothing and copy. The nice thing about this is that they have created it all in 3d, using the loading screen to give a brief tutorial on using the interface, you click and drag to move around – with the paper tilting and panning realistically. What I love about it is the level of detail – on top of the paper are 3d objects you can drag around and interact with, they even collide with each other. For example there is a London bus, you click it and then you can drive it around the newspaper, you can click and drag the individual headphones on the iPod, etc etc. When you view the photos they come out of the newspaper and enlarge so you can see them better. Love all the attention to detail and the interactivity, it also happens to look great, really cool site…
Created by Fábrica Do Design.
Incredible game ‘Windosill’. Featuring several puzzle games that involve you getting your ‘character’ through rooms, each with small interactive games. Amazingly detailed and crafted, you are dropped into a world of 3d objects that you can drag around and play with, everything feels very tactile and interactive. For example you can drag the small part of the ‘i’ in windosill and place it into the small hole in the wall to get to the next room. You can play the first half for free online to complete the game you have to play $3. Really cool…
Created by Patrick Smith, Vectorpark.
Nice little project for Uniqlo, this time in the shape of a calendar. Featuring tilt-shift photos in time-lapse video sequences of locations across Japan, when you click on the sequence a mosaic is produced – made up of Uniqlo products – which link through to the online store. Quite addictive just to watch the time-lapses showing the world going by, the tilt-shift technique adds a certain quality to the sequences. You can install a screen saver or embed it into your blog and set your local location to see local weather.
Portfolio site of Art Director / Graphic Designer Sebastian Gram. Very nice and simple vertical scrolling website showing his work, you click on an item and the area expands to show screengrabs of the projects. Nicely structured and clean crisp design, to the point!
Site promoting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Designed to teach children basic physics, the whole experience is played out via ‘Twitch’ a little character who you interact with to complete physics challenges. Really nice puzzle games that are well designed and polished, with great animations, cool music & sfx and a nice physics engine – all together combine an ideal fun and engaging site for kids (and adults!) to learn about physics.
Created by Unit9.
Entertaining site accompanying the BBC kids show ‘Big & Small’ – designed for children aged 3-6 and their parents. The site is a playground, with little interactive games and experiences such as hand painting, music, videos and so on. But what makes this so remarkable is the depth and polish of the site itself. Set within a detailed 3d environment you explore the setting via the interactive experiences, with your mouse affecting your view. But it isn’t just the way it looks, the interactive sections are really a lot of fun, each of them highly polished, with great animations and sound fx – it’s been a while since i’ve interacted with a site like this for so long! For example there is a small game where you have to try and brush the teeth of one of the characters and the toothpaste spreads all over the 3d items in the bathroom, the sink, the mirror etc. Another where one of the characters jumps on the bed and the bed surface reacts to his movement. The little touches all add up to make a fantastic website with incredible use of Papervision – really detailed environments, highly interactive, and really well designed.
Created by Plug-in Media. Really nice write up from Seb Lee-Delisle one of the team members that helped shape Papervision.
Part of the Uniqlo Parka Style 1000 series, another cool site promoting Uniqlo’s parkas. Similar to the ‘Pass the ball’ concept by Nike, in this case ‘pass the parka’, a series of videos & photos of real people from the streets of Tokyo all setup the same way, passing the parka to their left – this all makes a nice sequence of visuals which is interesting to watch it all passing by on screen. Nice addition of a map of Tokyo showing you where the person was ‘steet snapped’. Nicely executed as usual, with slick animations and cool transitions. Nice vibe from this project…
Created by Dentsu and Bascule inc.
Website showing the relationship the Norwegian people have with oil. ”The Norwegian oil story written by Norwegians’, the site allows each of Norway’s 5 million citizens to share how oil has affected their lives, and their country. Interesting way of presenting the thoughts and stories of people through bubbles, oil if you like, floating around in water. Love how the bubbles fill the screen and become slightly transparent – with the inside showing pictures and text mapped to the surface of the bubble, with your mouse moving around your view. Each of the sections of the site are very interactive and fun to play around with, where you can pick up and drag around bubbles and so on. Well designed and all the Flash is well produced with a high level of detail. Very cool!
Created by Fi.
Site promoting D&G’s range of jewellery. Very simple but engaging – the ‘jewels’ float around and interact with each other – when you rollover them they glow and other objects cannot go near them. It’s quite nice just to watch them bouncing around, when you click on one you zoom in and can see the object in more detail. Well designed and fun to use, nice!
Created by Hi-Res!
New portfolio site of British digital agency magneticNorth. Nice approach, using gesture recognition i.e. draw a line and you see news, draw a circle and we see a project. We’ve seen gesture recognition before but what I like about this one is the slickness & simplicity of it all – it just works. When drawing a circle to get a project the shape you draw becomes the mask for the content, where the video / screen grabs then appear in that area.
Created by themselves, Brendan Dawes is the creative director – that kinda helps getting visual concepts like this working!
New site of agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Pretty cool site of successful digital agency GS&P, this site is a nice example of an agency portfolio, lately a lot of agencies are opting for the html/blog style – but this is full Flash with videos and slick transitions. I like the main landing page with it’s plethora of videos, the search function is really cool, you can search for say a client name i.e. HP and all the projects featuring HP will be highlighted – this search mechanism also works in other sections of the site such as ‘people’ and ‘news’. The ‘people’ section of the site is actually really cool too. Well coded with lots of cool transitions and animation – worth checking out.
Site of make up artist Pepgay. Nice fullscreen Flash site with some beautiful photography, I like the way two images at a time are displayed – many really full of colour and depth. Nice bold typography and bottom thumbnail scroller, also like the way when you mouse over to the left the menu fades up – so when your mouse isn’t active you can see the images in all of their glory. A good example of a portfolio which is slick, stylish, and to the point.
Created by 2otsu – Oriol Bedia.
Site promoting Uniqlo’s range of bra tops. As usual Uniqlo provides another cool microsite promoting a new product, this time videos of 100 women talking about the bra tops. On top of this content is a layer of red dotted lines which draw things over the screen and ask simple questions about bra tops, at any time you can find out more about the products on display. Presented in a slideshow type way, as with many of Uniqlo’s online work you can sit back and watch, it’s clean, cool, and so so simple.
