We’ve been experimenting with different Flash banners on our home page — some built by us, some commissioned from in-house designs — but none of them were really accomplishing what we needed: to promote the speakers and sessions of Flashforward2006 Seattle while looking very cool.

“Who do we know who’s cool?” we asked ourselves. Right about then, Brendan Dawes, longtime friend of Flashforward, made the mistake of sending us a New Years greeting.

“Hey, Brendan is cool!” Email was sent. The result is now gracing our home page, and we think you’ll agree that it finally does what it should: look cool. Thanks, magneticNorth!

We asked Brendan to tell us a little bit about their inspiration and process for this project, and he sent the following. Read on to find out what all this has to do with James Bond…

Brendan Dawes:

When Lynda contacted us to see if there was anything we could create that would lift the Flashforward homepage, that could be done quickly, we looked into what stuff we had been playing around with that might be appropriate. Downsampling images was something that we were exploring but as always we were looking for a creative application of the technique.

We knew we had essentially 3 assets — the speaker images, their names and the session names. There was no time to put in a request for any kind of new imagery so we looked at the downsampling technique using the speaker images to create a rotating banner to show the confirmed speakers.

Using a technique though just for the sake of it is never what we’re about as a company — there has to be solid idea behind any kind of use of technology. I’ve always been a big fan of movie title sequences, particular the work of Maurice Binder and Saul Bass. One of my all time favorite ones is the Dr. No titles created by Maurice Binder. As you can see from the screen shots it’s a very graphical piece, based on the use of circles in juxtaposition to the type. So I thought this would be ideal inspiration for the Flashforward piece — a sort of a dynamic data driven update of that very title sequence, with the circles being generated by the images themselves.

Within a few hours we had a working piece that used the data from the Flashforward database. Notice there’s no “loading xml” message or any kind of preloader. We wanted to try and make the whole thing seamless — and anyway putting “loading xml” type messages is just far too geeky — newsflash: nobody cares! The other thing worth mentioning is the use of the images to generate the circles. You could say when the circles are big you can never make out it’s an image so why even bother loading an image in? Why not just use random colours. Well simply due to the fact that the composition of colours in a photograph is much more aesthetically pleasing than simply allowing the machine to randomly choose a colour.

Little projects like this are always great because they allow you to distill an idea down to it’s absolute essence, and with the time constraints we had there was never any chance of over analyzing the work — we just made it.

Brendan Dawes
Executive Creative Director, magneticNorth Interactive

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Meta, Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.