Lightmaker

My favorite part of the design would have to be the use of flash in the piece. I know this is mainly a css based site, but the flash compliments the overall aesthetic. The colors are bold and make the whole site stand out visually.

Really nice use of Flash! Loads very quickly and it is very nicely done.

Im not a Flash fan, but I love that.

The rest is very nice too, Portfolio works well and the typeography is good.

Hi, I'd appreciate if anyone could explain to me, how the flash animation was created. It is a video, isn´t it? Did you buy it or did you make the shot on your own?

Thanks a lot

Madeo

From the looks of it, it is a 3D animation that they made in house. One of there services is 3D. So there showcasing there talent in the animations.

It would probably be made in Maya or 3D Studio Max

The 3D header animation were done by our 3D team in Tunbridge Wells. They are multiple videos playing inside of the swf file embeded in the timeline. Hope that helps explain a little.

- James

@David, I think its a matter of knowing your audience on that call. they most likely figure anyone or company that wants to dealing with them, that uses dial up, is probably not the right fit in the first palce :)

I thinks thats akin to someone complaining that the site does not render well in IE 5.5. Hey, if they have IE 5.5 they will be used to seeing the internet look like shit anyway.

For a company that is "evolving interactivity," their site is barely interactive. Thats a bold claim that far too often, as seen here, can't be backed up.

The quality of the 3d videos, however, is stunning.

@Jason, I don't think their site has to be an interactive piece to backup their claim.

They have plenty of projects in their showcase that show they are more than capable of producing interactive sites/applications, e.g. the Harry Potter site.

Take a look at pentagram's site and you can see it's very simple, but lets their work stand out for itself.

One thing that is hardly ever taken into account with most web design companies is SEO. Search Engines can not read flash files and can not spider the sites to give them good rankings. Most companies that provide SEO or know anything about it know that you have to have content for the spiders to read. If they come to a website with a bunch of key words on Interactivity and then just find a flash file it does them no good. You can have all the keywords you want but without content for the spiders to read interactivity is useless. But to counter that point, they already have a page rank of 7 which is a really good standing and they could afford to have more flash on there site. It is all in how you position yourself.

Flash is beautiful indeed. Besides that - average...

Ridiculously small text. I know I can enlarge it. The problem is I HAVE TO enlarge it and I have good eyesight! It's a tiny, low-contrast arial narrow dammit!

Transitional doctype is nothing to be proud of (that's the one marked "avoid when possible") - fortunately they're closer to strict than transitional.

@Jon

Unfortunatly, I never made it past the home page, There was nothing really exciting about it. Even worse, no direct link to their portfolio. They make is so hard to view their work (yes I know only 2 or 3 clicks, but online that's a lot of work).

@Jon:

Your jealousy stinks so bad I can smell it from here.

You never made it past the home page but you know it is 2 (Yes...2 clicks) to get to 1 (yes one) of their portfolios.

They have a portfolio for each of their sections. Unlike many creatives they don't just do websites. Very easy to find for anyone with even half a brain cell. I suppose that counts you out though.

Let us all see your website Jon. Lets stand back in admiration of it.

mickey, i think you where refering to jason, but even so, lets keep the comments above the belt.

seth the only thing flash on the page is the header so unless i missed where spiders turn away at the first sign of flash, i believe they are ok. I have another question that never really gets looked at, with a site like this how important is seo anyway, how many jobs do they get or any design firm from somebody pulling up a search engine and looking up '3d animation company'. I know tons of designers and never have i heard of any of them getting work through somebody looking them up in a search engine.

not that , that means that seo is unimportant, but really how much importance should one pay outside of writting semantic code.

Stunning headers, that's for sure. Yet the design itselve is for from impressive, yet it doesn't disturb me.

Usability on the other hand...

I wanted to have a look at their hosting-packages and they where pdf's... Becouse I'm working on a slow PC, and have to click on many pdf's to test if the link works correctly, I told firefox to ask me where to save the pdf instead of directly opening it. My curiosity to look any further stopped right at that moment :)

Wow Mickey, thats all I have to say.

I think their work is great, but how they present it is pretty lackluster. I went back after Jon had menitoned their work to view their portfolio.And I really don't think it says much for a company to do "more than websites." Categorizing isn't something revolutionary.

But back on topic of the site. I doubt it loses any SEO by using the flash headers, and I completely agree that the importance of SEO is relative. If a company doesn't foresee much traffic from search engines, then there is no point in stresing ovr SEO, is there?

I tried to ignore the fact that I resent any site using Flash for reasons that don't appear to stretch further than soothing the author's ego when viewing this site.

The biggest issue I had with it is the font. As stated already by others, the font is ridiculously small and on my MCD screen at least, might as well be written in Arabic for what it's worth to me as a reader.

The look and feel, I felt was awful. Usually the only time I know that white text on black backgrounds is popular is on piracy sites or porn sites. (Er, so I heard anyway.)

Overall, I think, for a company which it "is a professional services agency that has been creating award winning interactive experiences the world over since 1997", I was expecting a lot more. Overall I found it slightly banal, incredibly hard to read, and, to some extent rather amateur looking, due to the colour choice.

Flash is beautiful indeed. Besides that - average...

Like most people said ... the Flash is well done and the overall layout is ok. I'm personall having a hard time reading the small white type on black ... maybe the line height is too low or you just need to increase the font size a bit.

Overall though I enjoy it.

I like this site, it's a great example of showcasing Flash talent without building the whole site in Flash. Some thoughts:

- I think each video should only play once instead of looping. The videos are great but once they start looping they just become a distraction. It would be better if they stopped and remained still.

- Like everyone said, the text is really small.

- The nav bar, contact info right on the homepage, and the contact form are all well done.

wow, what a great site. really nice.

I can confirm that lightmaker.net is indeed a client preview area, where clients can see the latest work that has been done on their site. I was lucky enough see inside this when I attended a couple of presentations by one of the Lightmaker directors whilst I was at university. They're a very talented and driven company, but with their feet firmly planted on the ground. Some of their work is absolutely beautiful.

i love your site!!! got new ideas for future designs.

The content is really boring and the content does not stand out, it needs a larger nicer font. The sexy illustration however makes it worth it, and the navigation is easy use.

We got a website designed and developed by Lightmaker many years ago called InterviewMe.

It was a blinding site but the owner of the company (InterviewMe) stuffed it up a bit and it was never completed.

Shame as Lightmaker really are one of the best :)

This is an awesome site... And the text is fine for my screen.

Dunno how sites like this get ratings as low as 4.9. Oh well, envy is a powerful motive I guess.

Beautiful and eyecatching animations! The beetle-bug animation is much worse than all the others; the legs are badly synched with the motion, and those guys don't fly with the shell - they've got wings underneath...