Day One SXSW Interactive - Unnatural Experiments in Web Design
Paul Annett - Clearleft Ltd
Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)
This talk was very entertaining and was a good light-hearted introduction to the conference, although I felt the content was a little lacking and the plugs for Clearleft, sliverback, etc were a little too in your face.
The examples were varied some were a little old but described the topic well. The two that stuck in my mind were the parallax effect used on the following site (resize your browser window to see the effect)
http://demo.marcofolio.net/a_parallax_illusion_with_css/
The other was a design one that I have never noticed before which is the hidden arrow in the negative space on the FedEx logo as below
http://wahya.biantara.com/2008/10/hidden-arrow-in-fedex-logo/
The Slides will be posted at http://clearleft.com/slides/paul/sxsw09 at a later date.
The following photo is the manual demonstration of the silverback landing page with the same parallax effect (http://silverbackapp.com/holding/)
Updated: just found this effect on the same marcofolio site that did the horse in motion above, it’s very clever http://demo.marcofolio.net/your_own_css_parallax_illusion/
My apologies if you thought I was plugging our products or company at all (as you mentioned in the excerpt of this article though not the article itself). That was not my intention and certainly wasn’t conscious. In fact, I deliberately avoided even mentioning what Silverback does so it couldn’t be interpreted that way.
I agree the parallax effect is limited in use but what is not conveyed in this post is all the little design nuggets and easter eggs that were discussed which although add little value to the finished work they are the polish/icing on the cake that makes those in the know smile.
This obviously has viral potential for example the Silverback one had something like 20K people sign up for more information prior to Clearleft really knowing what the products was due to elements like this one.
The parallax effect is cool, but where is it going to be used? I’ve seen it crop up on blogs and certain startups like silverback, but I can’t see a real world application of it - who cares if an animation happens when a browser is resized?
I think its going to be one of those things to demonstrate what’s possible, but it’s not going to be used in mainstream web design.