1997 Web Site and Interactive Catalog
June 5, 2002
It
had been about two years since I released the last electronic catalog
and I felt that the time was right to design something new. The advent of the
Web had started a buzz that things had to be new and exciting for you to get
traffic. And I was certainly caught up in this buzz. If the site design was
older than a few months I started feeling that I wasn't doing my job and I should
begin a redesign.
For
the CD-ROM audience, I chose a more metaphorical interface that would entertain
my users in addition to informing them about my type designs. The interface
I decided on was a 3-dimensional letterpress type studio. To explore the various
type designs that I have to offer, the user would be directed to the type case
in the back of the shop were they could open drawers and review the type designs.
Since
I was working on a new design for my downloadable electronic catalog,
I decided to implement the same look and feel into the web site to try and create
a more unified user experience between the web site and the downloadable or
offline interactive catalog. This would ensure
that when visitors who found me elsewhere stopped by the site, they would be
reassured that they were at the right site.
Soon
after I began this new project, a company called Futurewave released Futuresplash.
Futuresplash is the product that Macromedia Flash was before it was "Macromedia"
Flash. It was easier to use than Shockwave for Freehand, which I was still using,
and had the ability to anti-alias the image to remove the jagged edges.
Futuresplash
also had the benefit of having a much smaller plug-in
than Shockwave for Freehand did, weighing in at a svelte 80k as opposed to Shockwave
for Freehand's very heavy 998k. I decided to perform a test. For a couple of
weeks I would only offer the Futuresplash version of the site and there would
be no GIF version available. Any visitor to the site would have to get the plug-in to look at the typefaces. My test would determine
how people really felt about plug-ins. My hope
was that people wouldn't really mind an 80k plug-in
and that the requirement wouldn't be seen as overwhelmingly negative.
1996 Web Site (Cont.)
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1997 Web Site and Interactive Catalog (Cont.)
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