Posts Tagged ‘Renault Slovenia’

Mégane II

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Megane IIA 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.

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Renault.si (2002)

Tuesday, September 24th, 2002

Renault SlovenijaAfter heavy negotiations between Parsek and Renault Slovenija, they agreed on redesigning their existing and very out-of-date website.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.

URL:

http://www.renault.si

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Twingo Fotostrip

Friday, September 13th, 2002

Twingo fotostripThis 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.

Launch

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Rabljena Vozila

Monday, February 25th, 2002

Rabljena VozilaThis 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)

URL:

http://www.rabljenavozila.com

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Renault Trafic

Monday, December 17th, 2001

Renault TraficIf I remember correctly, this microsite for the Renault Trafic was designed dy Daka and it was done so quickly that if I didn’t have backups, I wouldn’t remember it at all.

Launch

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Renault Laguna

Tuesday, March 27th, 2001

Nova Laguna / The New LagunaThis was definitely one of the cooler minisites we did at Parsek. The concept was that, since the car used smart-cards to remember the driver’s preferences, we used a DNA-like menu. The composition was very peculiar and multi-layered but it featured all the standard gadgets, like a 360° external and internal view, color selector, image gallery, desktops, a screensaver, and e-cards. The music was done by Jan and the motion graphics by Ozi.

Because the internet teaser campaign wasn’t done by Parsek, it was clear that we still hadn’t gained enough of the client’s trust, but they were so pleased with the result that from then on, they’ve been collaborating with Parsek exclusively on all internet projects. Following the launch of this minisite, we redesigned the official Renault Slovenija site and did many more promotional minisites.

Although, I did suffer from heavy eyestrain and headaches while doing the site because of the constant flashing.

We also did a version of this minisite for Renault Japan, but they wanted us to lose the semi-transparent blue belt that covered the car because, apparently, customers kept asking them if they have the light-blue color in stock.

Launch minisite

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Renault.si 1999

Monday, March 1st, 1999

Renault SlovenijaRenault Slovenija was the first major project for Parsek and it has proven to be the most crucial and faithful one throughout the years. We did the first version in collaboration with Studio Marketing, who were doing all the advertising work for Renault Slovenija. The greatest challenge was freeing ourselves from the dictate of Studio Marketing’s designers, who, coming from the print media design, weren’t able to grasp the concept of designing for the web just yet. Soon, they were pesuaded to back off a bit, and the resulting website was very interesting. Weird, but in a good way.

Although, had I known, that my static-data Flash is going to keep me busy for the next few years, I’d think twice about doing it. Back then, we still hadn’t figured out that Flash (even version 4) could be programmed to load data dynamically, and the media could only be updated dynamically via Generator, which we couldn’t afford, so it was done in a lame static manner, that required me to open the Flash authoring environment, modify the content manually, export and finally upload the swf to the server. And all this every time Renault started or stopped selling a car with a particular engine, which was very often. And since they refused to finance a completely new website for about 3 years, I was updating the flashes manually at least once a week for a very long time. Needless to say, it was a good lesson and a damn good motive to learn about dynamic data.

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