Olliekoalas.com was a really fun and intense project. It was more of a promotional site then, as nobody KNEW what Ollie Koalas was in Jacksonville, and it had to be extremely enticing to kids.

This site was almost completely in flash, but still extremely lightweight and fast loading. Everything that could have been redrawn as a vector, was redrawn as a vector, art assets and fonts were shared so they only had to be loaded one, photographic images were all being pre-loaded during the appropriate lulls….a LOT went into this site.

However, if I was to do this site today, I would definitely make it more of a hybrid site. The SEO wasn’t great for Olliekoalas.com, and the updates were a beast. Flash deeplinking would be great, not just to re-enable the back and forward buttons on the browser, but also to create landing pages. An XML driven nav, and all XML driven content would also have helped in upkeep.

Overall, I’m still really happy with the site. It accomplished the goal of creating an experience that kids welcomed (and offered financial incentives for those kids to push their parents to go to Ollie Koalas), and completely killed anything Chuck E. Cheese had up at the time.

This really make me want to redo my current site into something more animation friendly…hhhhmmmmmm…

Happinated was one of the biggest illustrative and animation based flash projects I had taken on in quite some time.And the project itself wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if it wasn’t for a factors. ONE. The timeline for this project was cut DRAMATICALLY shorter than originally scoped. TWO. I had never drawn nor animated in an isometric inspired style.

Something else that ended up taking a little bit more time than expected was the actual character design. We had originally had something a little different in mind in terms of style, but then we realized that once the graphics were shrunken down to a size that would allow the user to actually 1)navigate the game and 2)navigate the site itself, we realized that design cuts were going to have to be made.

If you look at the sketches below, you can see how we went back to emphasize certain characteristics of the character, particularly in the face. The face was going to display several different “statuses” that the gamer was in (“Happinated”, “ok”, and “sad”).For the user to be able to quickly glance and recognize this, we went back and enlarged the Head to a much more disproportionate relation to the body.

What also had to be considered was how this style was going to translate into other characters, and this had to be a “future-proofed” style, in the event that this could get expanded to the point where others could make their own custom character and implant them into the game.

We also needed an art style where we could quickly illustrate people that we found on Twitter, and offer illustrations of them as incentives for them to participate with us online.

As for the process itself, there was actually very little sketching done on paper with pencil. I would have loved to have created a fully hand drawn look and animation, and then retraced it into illustrator and animate it with Flash, but the timeline, budget, and possible future uses of the artwork prohibited that.

It’s surprising just how much you can do when you’re forced to.

Happinated.com Project

So I’ve been working on H&L Trim, and this is the third (or is it forth) web design I’ve gone through. I’m not a big fan of having to split the Call to Actions so far apart, but the client is determined to have the business separated visually (the original request was to have a staircase), so I think we’ve made a good compromise.

There’s a lot I would have like to do different with this mockup, from the way it displays the features of each section, to how there isn’t an inclusion of current members of the site. But still, I’m happy with it. What do you think? I’m open to criticism.

A “coming soon” page? People still do those? Why yes, of course! One reason is to age your url for Google. The older your url, the more points google gives it, so why would you wait until the day your site is going like to purchase it?

Secondly, this company already has already been around, and people do currently look for it online. The alternative option is to do nothing, and let potential customers to either find somebody ELSE to work with, or allow them to see that H & L does have a web presence, and at least have a lead generation opportunity.

OK, now that all of that is done with, let’s look at the design. Does it say “Construction”? Yup. Does it say “professional”? I think so. Does it say, “under construction”? Nope, I should probably put that in there.;) Anyways, feel free to critique it or input your own ideas on it. Hopefully, it’ll only hep to make a better design.:)