MAT 150 - Flash 1

Designer exploration:

National Television is a California based design company that has representation all over the US and in the UK. I actually couldn’t find much information about them and couldn't get a screen shot, but oh well, that’s not the point. On their website, it appears, they seem to do a lot of advertising, but they also have a few music videos on their list.
What I like about their work are the various styles they use, everything from classic hand drawn animation, computer-based illustrations to live footage and even play dough. All though specializing in one area might make a company a good choice when you know exactly what you want, for a customer that’s willing to explore many possibilities this kind of company with versatile skills might be a better choice.
Some examples of the variety: in ‘Projects’ American Express “Play Doh”, Showtime “Californiacaion”, and Hyundai “Imagine” and in ‘Library’ Barclay’s “Fair and Square”, Scissor Sister “Thousand Words” (music video), and Virgin Digital “Music Muscle”.
A cool extra feature is a play list function where you can add the songs you liked to a play list and find out the song names and artists.
From a design point of view, I like the simple but effective font that stays the same throughout the pages, only changing colors, which are also very simple. I also like the rollover effects in the menu items and the pictures of the projects on the main page, as well as asking a little visitor intelligence to rollover the picture of a project on the pages with black background to get the play and close options and names of the projects, all of which, I believe, are done in Flash. More things I like are on the same black-backgrounded pages: the colors of the play and close options etc correspond with the color of the information box underneath the picture. Also, it’s nice to be able to navigate between the lists of projects without being taken a way from a project you’re currently watching, although going back to the main pages will do that.
A few minuses on the design of the website: a lot of the font on their main site if barely visible, and the visitor has to kind of lean in on an angle or move the monitor to be able to get the right kind of glare on the screen and read the text, especially the lower the text is on the screen (maybe this is a part of the required intelligence..). There is actually some information at the very bottom of the main page, which I accidentally saw as I did just the above: leaned in on a different/strange angle toward the screen.
This brings me to another minus: the pages don’t seem to scale to the size of the screen. At least when I’m on a MacBook (like right now), I can’t see all the information at the very bottom, which means I can’t be more specific on that “invisible” information on the front page I mentioned above. This would be mildly irritating if I had to scroll down, since there’s really not that much text on the pages to begin with, but there is no scrolling opportunity. I’m more than mildly irritated now.
But overall, I simply liked their versatile approach in designing for each customer. In the news section they have all kinds of interesting things, such as concept art for their Californiacation add, and a link to the British Design & Art Direction (D & AD) Awards site, where one can spend hours and hours of reviewing awarded works in numerous artistic fields.