Some of you have been on a bit of a journey over the past few days: we have had Jim and Coops being trained in Flash design by Mr G; Andy, Stephen, Nadine, Bonnie, Stacy and Kate all trained in the wonderful world of SEO and Paul and Deborah trained (and training) in Direct Sourcing. Ooohhh you busy lot. Anyway, it gave me an idea for a theme: navigation. So that’s what this week is about. Some interesting or different approaches to navigation. We take our inspiration from across the world, with ideas from Portugal, Japan, America and Norway. OK, I deleted the Norwegian site. Sorry.
Learn to fly with Michael Jordan
We are often asked to show how an organisation has changed over time. And the timelines tend to be dull, insipid things. But Nike has adopted an interesting approach to celebrate their relationship with Michael Jordan and I think the effect is quite nice. OK, some of the links are broken, but as someone who witnessed some of ‘Mike’s’ amazing on-court achievements in the 80s, I’m not complaining.
Wonderwall
Not to be confused with the Oasis song of the same name, Wonderwall is a Japanese design agency.. Odd, but funky. Oh and by the way, it kept crashing my machine. Just thought you ought to know…
Pure adwankery
Raison Pure Design Group believes “great creativity comes from a compelling juxtaposition of rational thought and emotional response.” Hmmmmmmmm…. I just liked the simplicity of their navigation.
Learning about the birds and bees
ZeeBee is another design house. Again, I thought the approach to navigation was simple, but engaging and took the approach of rpure to the next level.
Show, don’t tell
Cubic is another design agency. I chose them because they use pictograms on their site as a form of navigation. What I like about this approach is that it is universally accessible. And it needs to be, given that the localisation from Portuguese to English can be pretty poor at times (I particularly like the sentence “projects with the choosed tag”, or if there is only one portfolio example “project with the choosed tag”. Nice stuff…)
Fluid motion
I’m sure there is a term for this type of navigation, where the primary nav and body copy interrelate. But I don’t know it. And I can’t decide if I like it or not. But it’s different. And my voice is but one in a billion. Or six.