False positive?

I have to declared an interest in that Studio Egret West's website  is by a mate of mine, Joel Baumann, of Tomato .

Baumann is also Professor for New Media in the art school at Kassel university and takes the heretical (OK only among designers) view that websites need to be thought out very carefully and only at the very end should graphic designers be allowed in to tidy things up.

The whole information system on the Egret West site is based on balls in various shades from somewhere in the red spectrum which bounce around at the random click of a mouse button and eventually settle at the bottom of the page.

Click on full wide-screen and they settle further along the bottom. Just like real life.

Click on one of the balls and it swells up to fill the screen with an inserted image and the basic information. Click on either for more images or text.

Each ball has a label which on my screens is too pale to read. So clicking on a ball is a bit of a random, though pleasurable, experience. You surreptitiously click just to disturb the balls. And pleasurable and a bit random are things you could say about the whole site.

One of the few things a site really needs to do is to induce a positive response to the potential client's question, 'Could I work with these people for the next three or four years?' Some of you, wondering about that, might think that 'these people' might, unwittingly, really mean the web designer not the architect. But hey. what client is into perception theory?


 


egretwest screengrab

Please note: In order to post a response you need to be registered on the site. You can register here.

Reader Response

What is it about architects and flash animation? This is just annoying rubbish. It represents everything that is wrong about architects websites. If I were a client I would take one look at it and think that anyone who fell for this sort of gimmickry could not be trusted with my building. Take a look at Fosters website to see how it should be done.