True Production
True Independent Content Production
I’ve just completed a freelance web design assignment for True Production, the creative agency of experienced television advertising producer Paul Fenton. Paul has spent a career within the television advertisement production industry, working with what seems like an endless list of blue chip companies who have competed to create the most memorable, persuasive and identifiable advertising campaigns to grace our television sets. After 20 years creating TV ads for companies including Barclays, BMW, Nike, Lego and Virgin Airlines (to name a few), True Production was launched as an independent agency to foster relationships within the advertising industry and provide a fresh approach to television advert production. I was fortunate enough to be enlisted by True Production with the task of designing and creating their new company website. It proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and challenging process.
The Brief
What’s it like to work directly with creatively literate clients? That’s a question many freelance designers will be familiar with. True Production was formed by award winning Heads of Broadcast at top ten international agencies and creative hotshops, and it proved to be a great relationship. Paul Fenton worked closely with me throughout the creative process, with high expectations underpinned by an innate understanding of the challenges and restrictions presented by designers working with the web.
So once again the brief was simple, but that doesn’t mean it was going to be easy. Create a unique brand with an unconventional website layout. That sounded interesting to me already… but it didn’t stop there. The next request was to create the website using motion animation effects to create a site which looks like it was built using Adobe Flash, but isn’t.
Huh? …Okay so the rationale behind this was to recreate the smooth and elegant animation effects of Flash without the restrictions presented . Whilst Flash creates some great effects, it is not compatible with every web platform and browser. For instance Apple refuse to support Flash in any of their mobile iphone and ipad devices. It’s no secret however, see Apple’s Thought on Flash for their explanation and reasoning behind this. Furthermore whilst Flash is embedded onto a web page, search engine optimisation can suffer due to the absence of live content and text.
The Technology
The site was hard coded in XHTML and CSS, using Javascript and JQuery techniques to achieve the animation effects. Use of the CSS @font-face allowed me to offer True Production a much greater range of web embeddable fonts. Use of CSS gradients and the JQuery ’scrollTo’ command created the effect of a background colour fade whilst the page scrolls as the visitor clicks on items in the navigation menu. As the visitor navigates through the site, the pages gradually become darker moving from white on the homepage to a very dark shade of grey. A simple Javascript text fade transitions once the page scroll has been activated and the page lands, elegantly fading text onto each page… Just like Flash!
Whilst many of these effects work beautifully on our latest versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox… Internet Explorer proves to be very difficult to work with as ever. Particularly the older versions such as IE6. Conditional comments and IE stylesheets were used to overcome these problems, creating alternate versions of the website whilst still making the most of these effects. Whilst the results in IE6 and 7 are still good, www.trueproduction.com is best viewed in WebKit powered browsers.
Visit www.trueproduction.co.uk
