I always think every site I design is the worst ever. The most heav­ily com­pro­mised, the most failed in tech­ni­cal ambi­tion, the most ugly. And this lat­est train wreck, launch­ing today, is no exception:

The Thing About My Folks

As this is my first “new site” announce­ment on this blog, I think per­haps a brief cheat sheet is in order: I’m Senior Designer at New Line Cin­ema, which used to partly entail design­ing & devel­op­ing movie sites for sub­sidiary Fine Line Fea­tures. Recently, New Line & HBO Films mashed together Fine Line & New­mar­ket (an inde­pen­dent dis­trib­u­tor) and chris­tened the Franken­stein child Pic­ture­house. All this upheaval was pretty excit­ing at first, but led to pretty much no change at all for me: now I just do the same kind of sites for Picturehouse.

My job is a bit unusual for the indus­try in that I both design and develop these movie sites vir­tu­ally solo (roles typ­i­cally divided, and even then usu­ally whole teams of each). I’m far less of a devel­oper (to over­sim­plify: all the tech­ni­cal stuff like HTML & Flash) than a designer, so I don’t always have the tech­ni­cal chops to real­ize the inter­ac­tiv­ity I imag­ine (I often fear I’m not the great­est designer either, but that’s a neu­ro­sis for another blog post). Addi­tion­ally, devel­op­ing is so bloody time-intensive that I often spend a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of time wrestling with Flash and curs­ing (lit­er­ally, out loud) its inad­e­qua­cies; time that I should and would rather spend on the actual design. Which, these being enter­tain­ment sites, is rather important.

To put this in per­spec­tive, I loathed and nearly dis­owned my pre­vi­ous movie site, The Year of the Yao, but now it’s look­ing pretty good to me. I couldn’t really care less about pro­fes­sional sports in the first place, and the film was a bor­ing piece of NBA-financed pro­mo­tional fluff that even ESPN would prob­a­bly dis­miss as weak jour­nal­ism. So my moti­va­tion to make the site pretty was lack­ing to say the least, and yet it became one of my most well-received sites. The com­ple­tion of these projects often pro­duces gap­ing, yawn­ing silence from the stu­dio big­wigs, but I received more pos­i­tive feed­back on Yao than I per­haps ever did. It may have even been one of the final decid­ing fac­tors that led Pic­ture­house to agree to let­ting us (well, me) design their sites. Granted, it also mat­ters that hav­ing one salaried designer drone pro­duce a mediocre site is com­mer­cially prefer­able to hir­ing a pricey out­side firm to pro­duce a slick one. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

This site should have been dif­fer­ent. It’s my first for Pic­ture­house, and so the stakes were high and I’m really fear­ing I won’t live up to expec­ta­tions. Now it’s out there, and I’ll have to do my best in the next few weeks to tweak it to the point where I can live with it. The movie shows signs of being a suc­cess, unlike Yao, so it’s even more impor­tant that the site be acceptable.

•