If you’re going to promote your studio as cutting-edge, you’d better have an impressive Web page. This self-promotional site for Schematic fits the bill. It shows-off the studio’s creative, marketing and technological abilities and, at the same time, offers something unusual in the online space: freedom of movement.  The ambitious undertaking creates a unique sense of space, making the site a fun and engrossing experience instead of a mere collection of neatly partitioned pages and silos.

Built in Flash and Flex, and challenging the traditional means of navigation, it gives users an exceptional amount of control over the interface. While most are page- or state-based, the “ground-breaking” nav on this site is both. Visitors can explore content adhering to the standard rules of navigation hierarchy or via an advanced zoom feature, that allows the manipulation and movement of individual pages with a cursor, reminding them where they started and where they’re headed. (The traditional menu takes up a small percentage of screen real estate, to encourage visitors to play, explore and discover.)  

• The biggest challenge for the team? Determining how to handle the loading architecture of a site that is essentially one giant page.

• One main SWF loads thumbnails for each page by priority (those closest to the page that’s visible). Once a page is selected, an asset list is created from that page’s XML model provided by CAMs and downloaded before the site navigates to it, switching from the thumbnail view of the page to the actual content.

•  A separate application responsible for managing live thumbnails for each page runs server-side as a Windows service. The Adobe AIR application (built when AIR was code-named Apollo and still in alpha), “The Thumbnailer,” automatically generates thumbnails whenever content is changed.

• The entire project was completed in house, around a production schedule often derailed by client work, and from start to finish took 8 months (more than 30 people contributed to the site).