Yesterday MBUSA.com launched their website redesign. The new site is a major face lift from the old version, which was beginning to look outdated in comparison to many of its competitors. Every single element of the site has been upgraded and built completely in Flash, improving the overall user experience throughout.
I worked on the initial stages of this redesign at Critical Mass over two years ago. My involvement at the time was building a working prototype of the site in Flash. Only a few vehicles could be selectable back then, but overall the site’s design has not changed too much. The Mercedes-Benz’ development team has done a great job of finishing it off.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
I thought this day would never come. The soon to be award winning Rolex.com redesign has finally been launched.
Before leaving Critical Mass I spent around three months on the Rolex team helping out on the development side of this site. Although the site appears to be completly Flash to the common user, it supports deep linking and it is search engine friendly. If the user does not have Flash installed it degrades gracefully to an HTML version.
The design is incredible, featuring stunning photographs of scenery from around the world as well as many very gorgeous models, and of course plenty of beautiful watches that most of us will never be able to afford.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
Earlier today I received a news letter from ActionScript.org. This threw me off for a second because the only emails I get from them are job postings. The email template was well done and mimics their new site redesign, which is quite nice compared to their old outdated design. If you have already forgotten what it looked like, you can kind of make it out here using the Wayback Machine.
I am currently in the process of reading the excerpt from Tom Muck’s Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide. This excerpt is part of a new partnership between ActionScript.org and O’Reilly. It seems like a good deal for both sides. I am sure this will drive a lot more traffic to ActionScript.org and inevitably lead to more book sales for O’Reilly. So far the first few pages of the excerpt have been very well written and quite informative.
While reading the article I have realized that I will have to change my job title. Now that Flex has been released I am no longer a Flash Developer, but instead, a Client-Side ActionScript Programmer. I think that this is a much more dynamic sounding title, but it will take some getting used to after referring to myself as a Flash Developer for so long.
I am quite excited about the freshened up ActionScript.org site and enjoy having the ability to preview books before investing in them. Of course O’Reilly is one of my favorite publishers, so this is good news to me.
A friend of mine just showed me Adobe’s new icons for branding their next product line. The concept is cool. It reminds me of the Periodic Table of the Elements and obviously borrows some ideas from Macromedia’s old set of logos, making it easy for a consumer to determine that a product was part of the Macromedia’s line because of their similarities. This relation was not so apparent with Adobe’s products.
Overall, this new approach to branding by Adobe seems much better than the old swirls and feathers of the past, but I don’t really understand the color wheel. I’m assuming that it has something to do with the relation between products, but I cant recognize what that relation is, only that Adobe has left the products that they acquired from Macromedia the same color that they were before.
Roll over the icons to view the related product.
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