January 5th, 2010
Here’s something we ain’t blogged about yet: the portal of Taranaki, the beautiful region where Momentum was born. It’s a site-system that began as an effort to unify a family of websites that dealt with different aspects of life in Taranaki, like tourism, film, business, governance, etc. This was three years ago. Today’s Taranaki - Like No Other website has evolved considerably, and, like all good sites, that process is ongoing.
Allow me to guide you through some of the cool techniques we pulled designing this site.
The menu
The first challenge we had, was of course how to structure, and easily navigate such huge amounts of diverse data. Beyond the main areas (top-right) we still had enormous branches of information.
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May 8th, 2009
Customisation is nowhere near a new trend, however it is being taken a great deal more seriously in recent times. People are getting acquainted with online software, drawing it’s resources from a fixed, and distant server, looking and working exactly the same from home, from work, and from their smartphone at the airport.
Be they contacts, bookmarks, notes, to-dos, emails, or personalised news we get accustomed to the instant updatability we experience in our Facebook profiles, and tweets. Add to that, that the major players in internet (and corporate) life are constantly at war to win our own homepages, the place we begin our journeys on the internet most of them understanding that where you start your ride greatly determines the channels you will take.
And whoever controls public attention, controls a great deal more than just web-traffic, and you get all the cool new, widget-based approaches. Here’s a showcase of them, all worth exploration.
Widgetry exhibits
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May 1st, 2009
Logo-spoofing has always enjoyed great popularity among designers, and the generally geeky (in the most positive sense of the word!) public. A show of fun, critical thinking, and a little deviance (well respected among the creative) may culminate in a T-shirt displaying well-known corporate brand with a twist, like say the Starbucks logo saying “starsucks” instead. In recent times however, this fun practice has both increased, and shifted in theme towards the recession. Here’s a basic collection of what can be found in a session of google / flickr searches.
Recessed logos
Tehee. 
March 27th, 2009
I really have to be tight-lipped about this, otherwise the blog may self-destruct.. But the Jazz around the Momentum Headquarters is that we’re working on something very cool. I can’t tell ya what it is. I can’t tell you how we’re doing it. But I can sneak some previews out for you, if you agree to be remarkably discreet about them, for instance hide any prints under boulders like the english did with the first editions of the Rights of Man (Tom Paine).
Here’s a tasty mix of some of the UI elements involved in CENSORED !
And here’s the real sweet-picks..
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March 27th, 2009
Developing the new Momentum website was quite an undertaking, and as such, much of the midstream development, and concepts had to be sacrificed for the project to take up it’s current form. Hehe. But all that work doesn’t have to be wiped from the history books completely, so I thought I’d show you some of the tasty bits & pieces we made early in the development process..
I believe that every good User Interface design begins with icons.. Right? So we got a nice 3×3 info architecture going, and made these simple, metallic icons, and then..
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