The first two animations have been around the internet for a while. I’ve seen many animations with a similar style and I quite like it. I like the black and white feeling of it and how the characters and backgrounds are only consisted of drawn lines with no textures or colouring and somehow resemble drawings with a pen in a sketchbook. The third animation is the main character of my story - he’s a square and his name is Box. 

Here’s a channel where a series of short videos called “Simon’s Cat” are uploaded. http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat

I like the series because it’s entertaining, but I guess the thing that attracts me most is the style.

This is another video I’ve watched with a similar drawn style: What is Google Chrome OS?

For my short story I’m trying to animate my character and tell the story through an animation like the ones I mentioned above and I want everything in my story to have this pen and paper feeling, even the social networks I’m using in the story.

This will be my review for the website of a Nike product – Air Jordan 2012.

I found the website (http://www.nike.com/jumpman23/aj2012/) when I was reading an article featuring websites with interesting effects (link). All of the websites featured in the article are great, but I think this one is the best of all. The first thing you see when entering the website is something like a slogan and a message telling you to scroll. On the right, there is a navigation menu with links to the main product site, navigation, share and buy links and a link to the top of the page. The navigation for the site consists of three coloured circles and no text or pop-up boxes to tell you what each button is, so I was a bit confused at first. When I don’t know where a button like this will lead me, I usually check the bottom corner of my browser where the full URL pops up, so I found out that the buttons lead to different sections of the same page. I guess the main idea of this website is to make you scroll and blow your mind with amazing effects when showing you the product, so that’s why the navigation is so minimalistic.

When you start scrolling an image of a plane appears and with it, shoe parts appear, fitting neatly in the plane outline. Also notice that when you scroll, the blue button in the navigation gets bigger. On the left of the plane there’s a heading box saying “Fly over”, a box with text and a download link which allows you to download wallpaper versions of the “shoe-plane”. The parts in the plane are photos of different angles of the product, so you can have a good look at its features. When you scroll down, the current image disassembles with the same parallax effect if “flew” into the screen (and a ring appears around the navigation button). After getting mind-blown by the awesome 3D-like effect, you are now looking at the different features these shoes have to offer. Like on the previous “slide”, we have a header with a description box for the feature. We scroll down again, and now the inner sleeve of the shoe appears and the midsole goes into it. Here we have the same text boxes and more feature photos, like before. There isn’t anything to distract you from the content because the content on the page is quite minimal. Next we see the final product being assembles with more 3D-like animation, feature descriptions and a video in one of the boxes.

The other two products are presented in a similar way but each forms a different vehicle. The background colours for every product are different and even though they are bright colours, they were shades which are easy to look at.

At the end of the page you see the three products, each in its own box. There you can select a colour and buy the product, share on the social media and read a twitter feed with the product hashtags.

Parallax effects are usually quite CPU-intensive, and may run slow on older computers. I was surprised that the site ran smoother when I opened it in other browsers (my main browser is Chrome). I think it ran slowest on webkit-based browsers (Chrome and Safari) and performed better on Opera and Firefox. CPU usage and smoothest performance was reached on Internet Explorer 9 due to its GPU acceleration when rendering pages. The CPU usage on IE while scrolling was about 20%, while on other browsers it was between 30 and 50%. The loading speed of the website was quite fast and the quality of the images was nice and crispy.

I think the idea for this website is really creative and it is well executed. The great effects make your visit a great experience and the design is clean and focuses on presenting you the product with nothing that may distract you. I’d give the website a 10 out of 10.