Building gProjects web site was a team effort. For this project I have assembled and directed a team of creative professionals that included programmer John-Paul Ore and photographer Bellen Drake.
In the previous phase of identity development I have created gProjects logo and visual guidelines. Working within these guidelines while creating gProjects web site and subsequent print and advertising campaigns we were successful at building and establishing gProjects brand.
Following the guidance of our client we took a unique conceptual approach to building gProjects.net website. The main idea that dictated conceptual and visual development centered around the company's philosophy on green building practices and community building. Built more as a fan site then a sales tool for a building and development company, the web site follows a basic timeline of a construction process. It takes us from the beginning stages of construction to the sales phase only to bring us back to the design stages of future projects. The emphasis on this, by nature, cyclical process brings up an essential question of means to an end. To what end you may ask? gProjects seems to suggest a few answers: tread lightly, respect our community, our planet and future generations that will inherit it. Live consciously and consider the impact of our activities on planet Earth.
The site's content unwinds in a movie format with design symbols indicating hotspots of information. We added visual cues to help visitors understand both the method of navigation and their location within the navigation space. For example, since our horizontal navigation is non-standard, the main movie collage rolls from right to left at the start to illustrate the possibility of horizontal movement. To aid overall spacial orientation we borrowed a "helper bar" from the iPhone UI. The function of the bar is to indicate the horizontal position and the proportion of the visible to the entire collage. Depending on visitor's choice of hotspots the site can be explored in a linear or non linear way.
gProjects.net is built using Flash 9 / AS3 for the presentation layer and XML for the data layer. Our development team includes both AS3 and AS2 programmers, so although the main movie is AS3, the hotspot SWF movies can be Flash 9 or earlier, and are external, updatable, and accommodating.