This seemingly-simple website is an online portfolio for übergeek entertainment, a concert video production company. The home page is actually a showcase for the company’s most recent projects. Each element of the collage is a button that pops up either a video player or photo viewer. The design is clean, functional and very unique.
David Taylor, the owner of übergeek, lives in a 16×9 universe. High-definition video and film tell stories and convey emotions within this format. Most websites have varying heights with a constant width. This site lives in his world where objects don’t break the frame, therefore the site feels similar to film, but still makes use of web technology and complies with web standards.
“When David first explained his idea for the site, I was resistant to force his content into the unnecessarily restrictive 16×9 layout. A website can be flexible in format, allowing for more content. We talked it through and eventually came up with the idea of the image-only collage with roll-overs and pop-ups. This way, all the content was layered within the space. This also fit with his concern that viewers might not explore beyond the first page of the site, so he wanted all the main content to all fit in the small space. It was a challenge, but we worked together to find the solution.”
When I first approached Mitch, I had visions of a heavily animated flash site in mind. By the time we discussed our way through the process and what I was really after, Mitch had stripped it down to this very succinct, very well developed and rock solid expression of who übergeek is without ever bringing up the two most expensive words in web design . . . skip intro.