javier ferrer vidal

I am totally blown away by this site for photographer Javier Ferrer Vidal who is in himself a fantastic photographer who concentrates on portrait work. This flash site is slick to the enth degree. The opening view of the kid in glasses has been broken up in Photoshop and put on layers within flash to create this really slick parallax effect. Little details like the plane flying through the sky really add to the drama of this shot. This kind of parallax thing is VERY in vogue at the moment and I can think of quite a few examples of this being implemented really well (check out this months winner over at the IAB for a good example). I am actually deeply involved in a project now for a client who wants this effect to showcase their product.

As you delve deeper into this site you get to the photography which is all laid out in a 3D space in a haphazard manner. Rolling over one image turns it to greyscale and blurred (god bless flash 8) and clicking on an image gives you an enlarged version. The navigation throughout is simple. One click to zoom in and another to zoom out. This style of navigation is quite intuitive these days and it is pretty much a given that by clicking on the background it will take you back out. I think this kind of work will lead nicely into any multi-touch work that may come in the future as we figure out what kind of gestures will work for this new interface (check out my other blog posts on multi-touch).

And then to finish off there is the contact section with an underlying bit of video as a background of some people on a merry-go-round. As you move your mouse right they playhead goes forward and as you move left it goes back. Yes this is really simple to implement but the effect is perfect especially given the subject of the video. Oh and underpinning all this work is a sound track of considerable talent. It is perfectly fitting and really quite catchy. All round a great site, perfectly exectued in my mind.

one over

Mmmmm this portfolio site from Jon Ruppel, a designer/developer from Los Angeles, is just gorgeous. He has focused on a really clean layout that you can fully customize by changing background, layout and content. Interestingly this made me view a lot more of his work. I am loving the motion he has achieved in his tweens and I suspect he has discarded such crutches as the tween class in favour of hard coding it himself. The technique, if I am right, is this: nail your tween on the timeline and tweak it until it is perfect adding all those little extra bounces that make it look great (you'll need a high frame rate to get this looking good, I'd say 31 fps is best); then get flash to trace the x, y pos for you and push those to an array; use that array as the guide for each future tween and discard your timeline work. If anyone is really interested post a message and I'll send you some sample code as to how I would go about doing that. Check out the work here.