Does this look work?

[Skaven]

I'm doing a website for a business. They want a kinda "formal" look. I'm trying to use blue, black, and white as the color combo. So does this work or am I retarded? The image is large so the site takes a little time to load, I'll have to fix that I guess. Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated...


http://www.darkwatersoftware.com <---- The prototype




Skaven

[subman]

Very nice, personally I think it looks very corporate and upmarket, I think you have achieved the objective of making it look sexy and unique... Hope they see the light and choose it.

[wwwgpb]

I think your design looks great too. The colours definitly work for me.

Would you be willing to part with the secret to how you got your background image to look so good and continue to look good even when I resize the window and hence stretch your flash movie? I've been trying to find a solution to this for sooooo long. Have you traced the image?

Best regards.

Greg.

[Skaven]

Originally posted by wwwgpb
Would you be willing to part with the secret to how you got your background image to look so good and continue to look good even when I resize the window and hence stretch your flash movie? I've been trying to find a solution to this for sooooo long. Have you traced the image?

What I did was find a clean clear shot of buildings. I then went into a program called Bryce and created the blue sky with white clouds and rendered it 750 pixels wide. I imported that image into photoshop and cut out the buildings from their original sky (which wasn't long enough to span the width of the movie) and merged the two images together. So believe it or not, the sky in the image isn't even real. Then I saved the image of the buildings and new sky at a resolution of 150... (which is why the swf is such a large file) So basically sacrifice some effects and such but get a really clear kickass background! So hope this helps in some of your future projects!


Skaven
Kill

[wwwgpb]

So the upped dpi is the answer? Hmm very intersting. Thanks very much for the tip mate, appreciate it.

Best regards

Greg.

PS. You're clouds rock! I can't believe they aren't a real image!

[howdy30]

dpi is only the answer if you dont have to worry about bandwidth. doubling the dpi automatically doubles the file size.

why was that thing so huge? it felt like about one to two hundred k file size? consider tracing it. much quicker download and if you mess with it enough you'll get the effect your looking for. i.e. technology/money/power look.

on your text effects condiser not letting them drop back into shadow after they are luminated. it makes a bad subconsious analogy especially where the above mentioned is concerned.

i liked the photo. nice connotations. reminds me of those citibank commercials. of couse its not very original either. but the clientel your looking for will probably appreciate it. consider putting some movement into it. you can get a nice 3d effect by placing seperate parts of the image on seperate layes and then animating things in between them. just a thought.

[jhbiddle]

cool stuff

however, my eyes found reading the text difficult, and these are the boring things that people really care about.

also, was a little slow to load- or at least I did not know how long it was going to take. Consider a preloader.

how about some more images? Text alone can be boring.

anyway, cool look. nice work. just make it a bit easier to read.

cheers,

heresjonny.com

[roguenroll]

pretty good loading on my cable connection, but the nav text, especially a little cluttered and hard to read.

Coming from a heavy graphic design background as you look like you are too, I've had to sacrifice my 'vision' sometimes for the greater purpose of clearly and quickly conveying the message.

I usually try things out on my dad, (corporate eqvivalent),
and all the small text and funky navigations confus him.


As a point of reference, I think we at Flashkit are exposed to so much cutting edge stuff we get used to it, forgetting that corporate joe, might not even know its out there.

my 2 cents.

but the site looks nice.

Rogue

[wwwgpb]

Rogue,

I really agree with you on this. When doing flash work I'm always trying to take it too the next level to try and stand out from everything else thats out there. But my clients on the other hand want exactly whats already out there because thats what they like and thats what they're comfortable with. Seems no matter how hard I try to convince them to try something new they don't want to know about it. (Anyone read The Fountainhead??) At the end of the day they are paying for the site... I find it easy to forget that it's "their" site, not mine...

Best regards

Greg.

[cyberdude_9]

wow, that page took some time to load... perhaps it would be wise to add a preloader or give people a choice whether or not to enter the flash site, give an html alternative. But definetly add a preloader.

[jhbiddle]

Funky navigation can be great, but only in the right place.

The best, FUNKIEST navigation is one that is intuitive AND that has a degree of surprise and delight.

The best designers can pull this off. Good design puts the user first, and alpha tweening a distant second.

Just a thought.

[Skaven]

I really appreciate all of the feedback on my post everyone. I will definately take all of your comments into consideration. I'm having a little trouble with the site. I usually have my resolution set very very high (above 1024x768) Unfornately this is a pain when designing. And even worse I made this prototype in such a resolution and when i switched down to 1024x768 and lower, the image didnt span the whole page and the nav text was harder to read. It was like the whole thing was sqeezed together. Is there anyway I can fix this problem without remaking the whole thing in a lower resolution? Haha the site looks great when I export the movie on my computwer! But I doubt anyone viewing it will have such a high resolution....

Thanks,

Skaven
Kill

[roguenroll]

yeah, thats one of those things.

I guess the question is, who's gonna be looking?

probably, my guess, corporate types at 800x600.


might want to start there.

good luck

Rogue