Flaming Desks ‘Look and Feel’
Okay guys, below are the three themes that I’ve designed for the look and feel of Flaming Desks. Simply click on the thumbnails to enlarge!
They should be fairly self explanatory so I will try to keep my chat down to a minimum! With each one, I have followed the same order; starting with the homepage; then clicking through to the search function of ‘Find a desk’; followed by the search results. I think that this is sufficient enough to show the ideas clearly.
Theme 1
With a nice and simple interface, this design is about attention to detail. The homepage (Thumbnail 1) allows you to search for desks straight away meaning one less click from a user journey perspective (compared to the themes following - hence only two thumbnails for this theme!).
I would like to really work at crafting the assets of the page to reflect heat in an attempt to make the Flaming Desks logo itself look hot and bright. A nice little touch like this remains in context with the simplicity of the site design and will give it a real premium look.
Theme 2
Dave, this is the one we hope challenges the hell out of you, excites you, and doesn’t send you running! Is it possible to have the whole background of the browser as the interactive map itself??!
As you can see from my designs, the idea here is that the content of the site is over-layed on over the map. Users are able to select Find or List a desk and the relevant overlay unfolds above the map. Minimize them again and use the map to manually search out desks all over the world!
The nicest touch with this design (as I’m sure you’ll agree) is the hole cut out of the overlay when search results are displayed (Thumbnail 3). The idea here is that by selecting any of the located desks in the results list, and the map will zoom to the correct location of that specific desk, centering it tidily within the hole in the overlay… so Dave, you think this is doable?!
Theme 3
Still using the overlay idea, instead of the map as the background, using some really crisp imagery of nicely burned wood textures could look amazing! The photo I’ve used in these designs was taken by Alec Mills, an amateur photographer I found on Flickr. She has extremely kindly agreed to allow us to use her photo on the blog (and Dave, she will hopefully be providing a higher res version of this for you too). Even if we don’t use the image for the main site, it would be nice to use this in some way. Additionally, I am sure we will get some good photos from our desk burning exercise too, maybe the images could change?! Maybe that’s a conversation for another time!
The homepage (Thumbnail1) is as simple as can be; a nice self contained logo with buttons to ‘Find’ and ‘List’. On clicking one of the buttons, the self contained device then expands out from the center and everything happens within the white box.
September 5th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Loving (and a bit scared by) the interactive-map-as-a-background idea. Let me have a play around over the weekend and I’ll see if I can get a prototype working.
The charcoal image is awesome - I’d love to use something like this somewhere on the site, perhaps the registration pages where the map-as-a-background isn’t that applicable.
Can I refer you to my tagline post? We’ll definitely need one on the home page somewhere…