oh yeah, that project...

the solar century project has been in the background the past couple of weeks while i try to get my head around my website. but here's what i've been up to.

i've taken on the role of web designer at the moment, while ben comes up with a viral video that pops up when the solar panel is plugged into the usb port of the council's pooter. the idea being that we send out little bitty solar panels to coucils, to try to persuade them to use solar energy. they plug the little solar panel into their computer and a little viral video pops up, which then forwards you onto the website.

at the moment i'm not thinking about text and images too much, just figuring out where i want to put things.

at first i started drawing up my main idea - rollovers! i think that by using them cleverly it will be possible to create a really nice feeling of interaction. what i want to happen is for the little circles to get bigger as you roll over them, revealing information. i looked at some little circley ideas first.



then i drew up my first idea for the rollovers, a sun on top of an image of some nice grass, with little circle rollovers surrounding it.



as awesome as it would be to have a face covered in yellow face paint, staring out manically (the sun is manical), i decided that the idea may also be suitable for using the rollovers on top of a photo of a house, or a council building. not a kiddy-ish hand drawn one as shown below.



i tried to refine the idea down a bit more, trying to keep the fun feeling but make it less childish. this layout would probably look great as a flash site, but i'm sure i could figure it out with CSS as well. (the orange circles are going to be stills from the viral ad, with the centre of the sun having the lovely sun guy, maybe not his face, he can just pull a pose.)



this still felt a bit childish, so i also made a "boring as hell" layout, if we want to appeal more to the serious minded mindset of the councils. all nice and corporate and boring to design. but dammit the sun guy still gets in there!