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Taproot Creative
Current rating: 4.6 (368 votes)
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- Added: 29 July 2007
- Designer: Taproot Creative
- Submitter: Sean Doughtie
Review:
Taproot Creative applied a little TLC (tender-loving care) to their latest redesign.
One of the main features, and most innovating IMO is the sites ambiance feature. The site offers a daytime design and a nighttime design look, depending on the time of day in sunny Tallahassee, Florida. The daytime design loads a flash background movie with lazy summer skies and song birds and wind chime sounds fill the air. The night design loads a clear and starry night background, with a far off cricket providing the night's concerto.
The nighttime images are loaded from a separate folder, with the version being switched via a simple path call according to the time on the server clock, possibly done in the flash movies action scripting? This is all of the details on the dual design I could coerce from Taproot's Sean Doughtie, as I would love to implement something like this in my own designs.
For image replacement techniques in some cases a background image is assigned, and then a paragraph with class="invis" is used, with display property none making the text invisible in the screen version. A print version style sheet would have been a nice addition to the site.
At first I was not a big fan of the "What We've Done" page layout, the thumbnails are a bit ambiguous. But after clicking on a few of the items in the portfolio, and seeing the resulting page where they've done a nice job giving a brief overview for each project, I say bravo. The one screenshot tells the story use of the lightbox, fade-in - click - fade-out, is getting a bit stale, as seen on other sites.
Finally I was somewhat impressed by the use of the curvy corners javascript on the contact form, it just looks so right-on with the design. The digitally rendered black and white version of the Taproot's physical address in this Southern locale, make me yearn to visit this multi-disciplinary creative studio.
If you don't agree that this site has the right stuff to make the SG gallery, the please let us know why.
Your comments are highly valued.
Reviewed by Tyler Gossman
Designing with Web StandardsThere are 14 guest comments so far.
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FYI the screenshot for the review is a composite sketch, with the daytime design fading into the nighttime layout on the right, via a photoshop mask layer.
To view either version go to: www.archive.org and use the wayback machine, check some of the later archived versions, there are some of both night and day. Archive.org never sleeps!
Wow, lovely site. Great imagery and I love the ambience feature.
The navigation text is a bit light on both the base and active states. Secondly, a slight texture would have been cool instead of the plain brown of the content background, as it loses its "earthiness" on the longer pages. I was also clicking around like a maniac on that home page, so an indication of what parts are links can be helpful.
It seems like alot of complaints, but there's so much other good stuff on this site that it outweighs them.
Very nice & simple yet very effective delivery of content, totally serving its purpose.
Kinda large for me and im on a 21" monitor. The work and body should have been up higher and the header could be reduced.
Ty thanks for the feature and review. We appreciate it :). Also we didn't mean to not send you info about the time switcher, I wrote somethin up for you but I just never got to sending it. Anyway, in light of that! http://blog.taprootcreative.com/?p=29
@kl, we understand that not everyone (especially designers and developers) like sound, which is why we don't loop it. BUT, clients do, and it gives it a nice little ambiance to pull them into the "experience".
The what we've done page is preloading all the images ATM, cause of the hover effect of the thumb preview. But I'm about to nix that, cause it does take longer and we are going to add more pieces.
As for the PHP snippet (I assume the multi-form) I only provided the methodology of the form, not the security as that is a completely separate topic. But perhaps I should post about that in the blog.
I'm afraid this site leaves my under-impressed, and reinforces the reasons i no longer look to Stylegala for inspiration. The site's content is poor (other than their blog), and while there's not much of it, it is marked up loosely with unnecessary extra tags (extra spans in the nav and elsewhere, dont need a footer div to wrap 1 paragraph, home page has not 1 heading tag). If there's little content, the markup should be rock solid for a standards-based gallery site.
The time based featured is nice (I guess because I don't see it), but there is nothing on the page that tells me about it, I had to read about it here. So for many visitors, who come once, all that effort is in vain. And if this is the star of the site, why is it on Stylegala? Minimal markup that doesn't use tables and a nice javascript shouldn't be Stylegala material.
Love it - it's got balls and personality. The time thing is sweet and adds an extra dimension to the site. Good find SG - this is exactly what should be shown, imo ...
Breathing design: It's nicely simple, has a strong opposition between handwritten vs sans-serif font, though a little bit over-used all over the site.
The sans-serif font choosen is original in this context, breaking the usual corporate feeling a creative agency studio tries to insufflate while staying cool. A little bit too cool in this case ?
Portofolio thumbnails are too small.
As for the day/night rotating system I do the same on my home page wether it's raining, snowing, sunshine, full moon etc... in the place where I live.
Lovely work, very clean and simple.
Very nice..
It is not my personal webdesign style but I like the site. The night and day change is cool and as user it is easy to understand whats behind of it.
OK that "grass-line-at-the-top" is a bit often used by a bit too much sites in the last time...
nice background image, very nice bird sound, night design loads a clear and starry night background. good Taproot Creative's work.
As a designer I loved it. It just cheered me up Stylistically it's beautiful and it's definately something I haven't seen before. I hope it can eventually function a little better without sacrificing its visual flavor. Nice and smooth artwork.
nicely interface