Well, here is the second of five IDM(Inspiration Design Model) posts for my “Interactive Media I”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/ class. I liked this website a lot less than the first one: “smallTransport”:http://jewlofthelotus.com/articles/2006/09/07/smalltransport-idm, but I didn’t really like that one much either…
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Well I guess I’m really mostly just turned off by this website “[JUXT Interactive]”:http://juxtinteractive.com. It’s definitely designed to market to a very specific audience. It’s got very masculine tones and fonts that the strong masculine images around the page enhance. I found this design somewhat surprising though, once I’d seen their examples of recent work – which were for the most part more neutral than their masculine home page. I also found it surprising that most of their recent websites and past projects had very interactive, javascript and flash heavy designs, while their own home page was very static and hard. There is also no navigation on the site, you’re just supposed to scroll up and down in hopes of finding what you’re looking for – again, unlike many of their client sites.
But I guess the examples can speak for themselves on the design, skills, and creativity of the JUXT Interactive team. Their example websites are entertaining and in some cases addictive (like this site for “Nestea ICE”:http://www.nesteaice.com/index.jsp – in which it is your job as a flying forearm to turn the spastic sheep below you into an ice cube by pouring your ultra cold Nestea ICE on him). Nice.
Still, the JUXT Interactive team can’t impress someone with their portfolio of fancy JavaScript and Flash websites if their visitor doesn’t have images, JavaScript, or Flash enabled. Someone who winds up at JUXT Interactive with these things disabled might not be able to decipher the purpose of the page and move on.
With their impressive list of clients, this approach must be working for them though.