Sunday, February 08, 2009

Studio/Artist Exploration - Cmd9.com



In my search for an interesting Flash Design Studio, I was looking for two main feature that separated itself from all other flash design websites, and that was in the area of site navigation and also to see Flash Design from a foreigner perspective. I wasn't too concern about the graphic design layout since most flashed based websites I perused were top of the line. However, there seemed to be a trend I was noticing with some of the sites: I was having difficultly in reading it, understanding what I was looking at, and having a hard time navigating.

One of the challenges I believe in designing in Flash is balancing content with design layout. With Flash it is tempting to be too 'Flashy' and the end result is that content is overlooked or not even seen. You can throw in a lot of great artwork and animation but it needs to be put together well in a way that is legible and makes sense to the user. There were times were I felt frustrated trying to figure out how to navigate through some of these sites. In a few instances I had to play around with the mouse to figure out what needed to happen next.

I found one site that was unique in how it presented its navigation and the content was fairly easy to grasp. This studio was created by a Japanese Graphic Designer, Junichi Kato, who named his company, Cmd9.com . Junichi offered a unique and interesting navigation layout by attempting to using 3 dimensional navigational menu sets, with the main hierarchy appearing further back as each new link and subsequent link were open (as seen above). This was pretty unique compared to the conventional method of opening different pages of each new link. The main page could still be seen in the background regardless of what link was clicked.

One of the strongest points about his design was he doesn't get too flashy immediately. His main page contains current examples of his studio's artwork and past clients. It was no nonsense. No guessing. Just Boom! Right there for the world to see. (see pic below)


Let's Look at some his Flash Portfolio. Here is one were he did one for Beyes.com which is a a showcase art gallery. One of the interesting thing is he uses the Alphabet for a navigational menu set to link to each artwork

Toyota Rush - Video
Uniqlo - Navigation
Halloween Show - Video
Vertical Garden - Hands On Navigation

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