tripleaxis.com

View the Bentley Continental GT Convertible Microsite

Yet another tight deadline for this one. I think it topped out at around 3 weeks’ dev time on this. Completely content managed and data driven, this site featured a fair amount of ported code from the Bentley 60Yr Microsite as rewriting from scratch would simply have been impossible in the time given.

This kind of situation really brings home the value of code reusability and writing clean, modular class structures that provide flexibility and the option to slot them into different scenarios. I probably saved my own bacon on this occasion simply by putting a little forward thinking into some of my classes.

The CGTC site was another microsite, but I’m finding microsites are getting bigger and bigger. There are a hell of a lot of corporate sites out there that feature less sections, information and complexity than the majority of the ‘microsites’ that are released these days. I just hope the price of these things is growing proportionally .

Design/Technology
Basically ported from the 60Yr site, I created a hotspot interaction system for these sections where the thumbnail preview floats to your mouse on rollover and shows a crop of the image that will be revealed on clicking the item. The thumbnail expands on click to reveal the entire image.

Section transitions
Yet another testament to code reuse, this feature used the core of a class from almost a year ago to allow progression between views using a simple directional slide. In the CGTC site, we only used horizontal slides – left or right as per the section’s menu position, but vertical slides were also optional.

Image Transitions
Taking the 60Yr colour bleaching effect a little further, I created some scripted transitions that push a movieclip’s RGB values about, fading in from invisible to visible, whilst using a shifting colour value to tint the transition. The class allows for varying speeds and tints and is extremely effective in sections like Space (Interior) and Performance (driving), using colour and speed to create two very unique transitions.

Image Effects
Within the different sections, our designers came up with some really cool effects that overlay the images, providing depth and another dimension to imagery that can sometimes seem flat and dull. It seems like a simple thing to add to a site, but the actuality is that striking a balance between effectiveness/visibility and sublety can be suprisingly difficult.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 14:40 and is filed under Client Projects, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave your thoughts, or trackback from your own site.

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