Saturday, September 27, 2008

Design Exploration


Hello Sour Sally (http://www.hellosoursally.com)

Hello Sour Sally is the home page for a frozen yogurt shop in Jakarta, Malaysia designed by a Singaporean company named Kinetic Singapore (http://www.kinetic.com.sg).

The product is the non-fat frozen yogurt with unusual toppings and flavors. The challenge of design is “what do your potential customers think when they see your logo or hear your name?” It has to be different from other frozen yogurt products. An identity should be recognized by consumers – perhaps with unique toppings or flavors, or by branding it as “something different but sweet.”

The animation is created with Flash. The cartoon character, Sally, initially starts floating around with a balloon, which you pop to make her land into various cups of yogurt that represent the site content. If you collect all the possible frozen yogurt ingredients, the game experience is completed with an additional “reward” content being unlocked. But if you’re not into the game-like navigation, you can still browse the site via menu tab.

The identity “different but sweet” captures the vision of the site’s design. A consistent message is conveyed across the board through a pen-and-ink art technique, the choice of music, game-style navigation, and an old-fashioned children’s storybook presentation. The color scheme, typeface and contrast of scale are all well planned as well. In my opinion, this piece of design is effective.


The Legend of Zelda (http://www.Zelda.com/gcn)

This promotional piece is for Nintendo’s Zelda video game series, with target consumer being kids and young teens. Visitors to this website are immediately introduced to the immersive nature of the game through a panoramic environment that simulates elements of the game. Visitors can also get the details of the storyline through a scrolling legend, meet the characters using a page-turning book, explore the arsenal, and get tips and hints about their gaming adventures.


The main character in the series is Link, who seeks exciting and challenging adventures among various islands in the Great Sea. Visitors can pan around an island scene, where day turns to night, fish leap out of the water, and sea gulls cry out as they fly by etc.

The features I find interesting in this design are:
  1. Guiding the Eye – The red Zelda logo grabs eye attention immediately. The image then directs the user’s eyes through a sequence of steps from movie clips, animation with audio, to navigation and sidebar.
  2. Good spacing – Space between lines/padding/white-space is easy to read.
  3. Clear Navigation and Orientation – Easy to find out where you can go and where you are now
  4. Typography – Font choices/font sizes/spacing/line length/color all are well coordinated.
  5. Clean alignment – Makes design more ordered, digestible and more polished.
“Second Story” (http://secondstory.com) is the creator of this site. It’s a Portland-based company starting business in 1994. It has developed over 200 interesting interactive multimedia projects.

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