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.
This site was still done with Flash 4, because it was still too early to expect a high adoption rate of Flash 5. So I used the experience I gained from programming in Flash 5 to try to push Flash 4 to the limit with dynamically created menus and content. Because a lot of things still had to be updated manually, I tried to make it as simple as possible, especially because I refused to update the site myself.
With new investors in the game, Parsek moved location to the very center of Ljubljana. Everybody got a hefty raise, the offices were amazing and the company slowly started going very corporate. The site we did for Parsek was much more serious and informative, but still retained the youthful and playful, yet at times cynical attitude that defined the company. It featured the new “square” logo and the dotted world map with 3.26 written on it. The site was flash-enhanced HTML, the design echoing the new dotcom yuppie times – faceless young techno-junkies taking over the world is how I would describe it.
Renault 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.
This was one of those never-ending stories where I’m lucky that my involvement was minimal. It was a huge project for a tough client and it took forever to make. Basically, I only did a few Flash gadgets for the site, like the interactive maps and a webcam application. Pretty basic stuff, really, but at a time when Flash was used for “kewl” animated menus and buttons, these gadgets were actually useful.
The very first client work I’ve ever done was this site for the Hepatitis B awareness and innoculation campaign, conducted by the Institute of Public Health. I’m completely amazed that it’s still online, considering it was done at a time when I still had a lot to learn about Flash and other internet technologies, so the production was basically me and Ozi trying to figure out how to make a pull-down menu in Flash and me taking the programmers’ instructions on how to post a form. I was also fiddling with some audio software back then, so I created a groovy but a bit menacing sound loop for the site.