My involvement in the production of this website was rather low. I did was a calendar application for the programme section, but apparently, they don’t use it at all, so it’s empty all the time. I believe the rest of the site was done by Fry and Boris.
I think this was Parsek’s first site running on the CP2 architecture.
A minisite that I don’t really like that much. I wasn’t really on the same page with the new designer on this one, so the result was a bit questionable. The TV spot featured the new Mégane driving across the landscape on the Moon, trying to show how well it stuck to the road. So the minisite was set in something that was supposed to be a collosal empty space station with a floating thing, which was a bit of a Lenny Kravitz video rip-off, serving as a projector. In the background, there were a few silhouettes exported from Walk Designer kind of jumping around and stuff.
Anyway, I had a hard time doing this, because using 3D renders in Flash is really tricky if you want to keep the Flash small, and especially if you don’t have the whole thing completely worked out in advance. I had a hard time explaining this to the designer and I ultimately failed. He basically just handed me the pre-rendered elements and I had to figure out how to use them. Not to mention that the design didn’t provide any way to include the content at first.
This minisite is basically a mix of things we’d done in the past: expanding menus, tsunami menus, Japanese type, the spring effect…
I think I did most of it, but I remember I knew I won’t be able to finish it for some reason and I triend to make the code as readable to Fry as possible, so he could add the e-card application and finish adding the content.
I remember programming this riding a bus to Nova Gorica where I was giving a lecture at Mobilatorij .
A web application that was used on several Parsek sites, including the election campaign website of LDS (Liberal Democrats of Slovenia) and the Renault Slovenija website. The application generates clickable points on the map according to dynamically loaded coordinates defined by the Gauss-Krüger system. This way, the points needn’t be positioned manually, but can be loaded from an external XML source, such as a static file or dynamically generated from a database resultset.
I think this was one of the coolest websites we did at Parsek. Nordcross is a production company of Igor Zupe and Sašo Podgoršek who have done a lot of cool stuf for NSK over the years. We tried to get away from the standard website interface and create something more experimental. The result was pretty cool, especially for those times, and it was a big technical achievement, since it was done with the new Flash 5 and featured QuickTime video. Although the two had been used before, the all-flash site with QuickTime seemingly embedded into it was a breakthrough at the time. After some time, when new browsers came out, the “video over flash” didn’t work anymore, so I decided to try to rebuild the site in Flash 6 as an exercise, enabling the viewing of videos again by using the new video feature in Flash. The site was designed by Ozi, the video preview animations were done by Žiga, the desktops were done by both of them, and the background music was provided by 300.000 V.K.
After heavy negotiations between Parsek and Renault Slovenija, they agreed on redesigning their existing and very out-of-date website. I think this is one of the sites I’m most proud of, becuase by then, I had enough experience with what should be done dynamically and how. It was a big step forward in the sense that the structure was so well planned, that there is still no need to replace the site.
In addition, it makes very good use of the internet as a medium, offering many different services that makes life at least a bit easier for owners (and future owners) of Renault vehicles. It’s definitely not an advertising site, but a service for their customers.
In spite of huge amounts of content on the site, it looks light and it’s easy to navigate. What I like most about it is that, once it was done, there was never any need to modify the site’s skeleton. The textual and visual content is fed via JSP generated XML and managed through Parsek’s SeeEdit CMS. How the site’s layout works is cross-browser voodoo that only Fry can do.
This cute little photostory was done as a splash for the home page of the Renault Slovenija website. It promoted an edition of the Twingo car which boasted a preinstalled sound system. After a fun photo session, Ozi designed the individual screens and I did the cool transitions.
I was very uncomfortable with the general atmosphere at Parsek at the time, and I tried to take home as much work as possible. I remember working on this one mostly at home.
This game, done for the insurance company Slovenica, was made to promote the insurance plans for children in school. Since kids like getting into all sorts of accidents at school, we made a first-person paper fight between schoolmates. It was based on a game we’d done before as Parsek’s New Year’s greeting card, although I rewrote the engine for this one.
The nice illustrations were done by Andrej and I very much enjoyed animating the characters, since they were so cute and devilish at the same time.
The controls are: mouse for aiming and throwing, spacebar to duck behind the desk.
The first website we did for a Japanese client was for the organisation that is the authority on the art of ikebana in Japan. It was done in collaboration with the now ex-company DentsuFUSE. We’d gotten a visit from Dentsu’s designer Matty Sallin and programmer Krishna Manda.
Matty presented the idea of an abstract flower-like menu that would react to the user’s selection by sheding a petal which transformed into a multi-angle circular submenu. Upon pressing one of the submenu items, the submenu transformed into a rectangle which held the chosen content.
The color scheme changed randomly every time the site was reloaded and the background was a flower structure with petals of the same hue but randomly offset lightness and saturation. It was a beautiful, elegant, poetic.
The content featured all sorts of gadgets: Interactive maps, store, a 3-layered draggable timeline, ikebana courses search engine…
Technically, it was a huge challenge because it had to be done in Japanese, so I went to the FlashForward 2001 seminar in Amsterdam to find out how to do Japanese in Flash 5, and nobody really knew, so I basically had to figure it out on my own.
The static and dynamic text was achieved by using a Japanese version of Flash 5 which featured support for the ShiftJIS support. It had to be installed on a Japanese edition of Windows. So I worked in the regular edition and exported on a VMWare virtual machine with the Japanese editions of Windows and Flash.
There were many parties involved in the project and it was so poorly managed that I’m actually surprised that we not only finished it, but managed to do it extremely well. But all in all, the process was a nightmare and it was the first seed of my eventual departure from Parsek.
This project was a pretty nice attempt at usable interface design. It’s a search engine for used cars, which was quite advanced at the time, and now, looking at it, it’s still pretty cool. The goal was to design a usable three-step, one-page flash interface for the search engine. At that time, most of the similar search engines featured HTML-form based interfaces, which reloaded the page at every step.
Since this was one of my first exercises in interface design, it’s nice to see that I already saw a faint glimmer of the “using data to modify data” principle. For example, the range slider, used to select year, engine power, mileage and price ranges, also serves as a bar graph, showing the number of vehicles available for each step.
It also has nifty DHTML tricks, all courtesy of Fry. The one I like most is the comparison windows that arrange themselves horizontally and scroll together to keep the vehicle characteristics inline.
If you ask me, this is the site where the attention to detail and the dedication of each member of Parsek’s team is most apparent. (Some improvements as well as some bugs have been introduced into the interface since I left)