mercoledì 5 settembre 2007

ego[n]'s website and the barber paradox


Designing a website about one's own work is a difficult thing.
It implies asking ourselves fundamental questions about our work and goals. A slightly philosophical thing: "what do we do exactly? and why?".
Doing a personal website is an easy thing when one's in design school, but it becomes a nasty task for a professional studio or agency. It has maybe to do with Bertrand Russell and his barber paradox: "who shaves the barber, if he shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves?" (or, in other words: "who does websites for the people who do websites for those who aren't able to do them by themselves?")...
All this to say that realizing ego[n] website has not been an easy task. We tried many solutions, before being hit by the possibilities of a new Flash rendering engine: Papervision3d. It's an amazing piece of software, and allowed us to show exactly how the various format issues of ego[n] relate to the packaging. Although many visualizations done with Papervision 3d are more photorealistic in effect, we liked it instead for its abstract possibilities. Although we needed a complete website to promote the magazine, we still consider this as a work in progress and we plan to add more features and flash experiments in the future.
The challenge was to mix that with a more traditional html/css based structure. Visual candy had to live side by side (actually under, thanks to inline frames) the html data, and we went in for some integration through javascript.

2 commenti:

Peter Reynolds ha detto...

This is lovely :-)

I'm in a real hurry to present some images and am writing to enquire as to whether it'd be possible to share you source for adaptation.

If it open source? Perhaps I could trade –- recently completed an adaption of Papervision so it runs as a 3d driving game gaming engine.

Thank you,


Peter

Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini ha detto...

We based ego[n] website on a open source papervision3d demo called papercloud. You should find it in the demos folder of the papervision3d distribution. We believe is a far better starting point than our code, which has a lot of extra support for js which could cause a lot of errors if used out of this environment. Please feel free to contact us if you need further information.