andrew maxwell, swing state poster, reap what you sew & colour notes success_060308
check out our new website for the irish comedian,?andrew maxwell. it’s a bit like sitting in a greasy spoon reading the paper. also, take a look at our first film poster for the documentary, swing state. in other news we have started work with nicole mackinly hahn on her reap what you sew project. we’ve made?a holding page for her where you can find out more information about the project. last but not least, the?children’s book on colour theory that we designed is now for sale in the?tate modern.
I’m afraid I find your Andrew Maxwell website absolutely dreadful. Due to being entirely in Flash it doesn’t fit in the window on my laptop, I can’t bookmark any pages and I can’t even view all the content at once due to the odd scrolling mechanism you have.
It’s possible the least web-friendly website I’ve ever used and is incredibly unusable. You break bookmarks, tabs, links and copying text. It also has jarring background sounds that seem to serve no purpose and has JPEG artifacts from overcompressed images everywhere.
I hope you see this as constructive criticism and seriously consider how you design your pages in future as its seriously difficult and irritating to use sites in that format and its a real shame to see one of my favourite comedians with such a dreadful site.
I second that sentiment. Andrew is an incredibly funny man, easily the best comedy I saw at the fringe in 2007 (and that knocks down some big names!). However, he is let down by this website. There are many ways to maintain the same look, feel, interactivity, comedic charm, and so on and so forth, without being so … well, see above.
Hi Patrick, Mike,
Thanks for the comments and for your views – we appreciate the honesty and will definitely take them on board.
Much of your criticism of the site echoes common themes about the role of Flash in the web in general. First off, I should point out that we have a great respect for standards and we do realise the issues that the use of Flash can cause. I also acknowledge that much of the site would be reproducible in HTML/CSS/JS and can understand your consequent frustration about that.
We use Flash for sites like these because the possibilities of that platform far exceed HTML. With HTML, our options would be limited by the technology in a way that they would not be by Flash. Examples of this are things like the ability to mask images, have audio synchronised to user events, perform colour transforms and so on. HTML / AJAX can approach some of these, but usually at a higher time / cost investment. The trade-off of platform choice is ultimately something which can differ from person to person and site to site.
I hope this clarifies the reasons behind the choice somewhat. Again thanks for the comments, we will keep them in mind.
Giles