Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Machete & Jay-Z Hits Collection - Design Exploration

1. Machete (http://www.vivamachete.com/)
The promotional site for the movie Machete is a nice example of Flash design that is simple yet effective. First of all, the color of the whole design scheme is very cool, with lots of hot colors and high contrasts. The text effectively conveys the dirty, gritty, stoic nature of Machete, and the title text also implies the kind of tongue-in-cheek action movies that this is a throwback to.
I really like the way the site is a grid of images of the different characters, with very nice rollover effects and easy visual access to the links to the Story, Video, and Gallery.


Clicking on any of the characters will load in an on-demand high-resolution image of the character that fills the screen. This is all one page in Flash; clicking on anything won't take you to another web page, but just load in on-demand content.
Down at the bottom corners you have a couple of links for social networking sharing.
Rolling over any of the buttons also has a sound effect, but there is no background music for the whole site.
This site really appeals to me because of its simple yet visually rich and clear layout & design, and Flash works well here to make it happen.

2. Jay-Z Hits Collection (http://www.jayzhitscollection.com/)
Found this site through the FWA; it's really neat. It's for Jay-Z's Hits Collection, and kind of shows the history of his music career, and has photos of him. The site uses Flash very nicely, with lots of cool rollover effects (i.e. having the years 1989-1998 pop up underneath "The Beginning", the cool effect with the water when you roll over it).
The transitions when you go from one page to the next are short clips of video in New York with an overlay quote by Jay-Z. The whole site feels extremely classy and legit, and lends to Jay-Z's image as a mature rapper.

The black and white color scheme and corporate, expensive feeling text also adds to this image.
Furthermore, you have background audio - clips from various Jay-Z songs, that really help the website feel more (inter)active, with controls for volume.

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