An update to an ear­lier post on the Tris­tram Shandy sites: Urgent Pipe Dream not only grokked the whole thing, but found my port­fo­lio and con­nected me with them by name.

Kind of amus­ing the author assumes we have a whole agency instead of, well, just my boss and me. Thanks for the hon­est cri­tique, and espe­cially the kind words on the “real” movie site.

www.thenotoriousbettiepage.com

The offi­cial site for the Pic­ture­house film The Noto­ri­ous Bet­tie Page. Not quite as highly con­cep­tual as either Tris­tram Shandy site, my idea here was just to reflect the design of con­tem­po­rary girlie mag­a­zines seen in the film. See if you can spot my Pho­to­shop­ping on one of the Gretchen Mol images to appease the MPAA censors.

www.tristramshandymovie.com/site

The offi­cial site for the Pic­ture­house film Tris­tram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. A bar­gain for Pic­ture­house: two movie sites for the price of one. This new “real” movie site accom­pa­nies an already-launched elab­o­rate meta-joke con­ceived of and writ­ten by my boss. This one is more my baby: an extended English-major wank.

The first attracted a lit­tle blog action: Enter­tain­ment Weekly Pop­watch and Dig­i­tal Hive. Unfor­tu­nately, nei­ther blog­ger appears to have dis­cov­ered the sec­ond site. Either they didn’t spot it, or the first site vastly over­shad­ows it. The for­mer is cer­tainly clever & unique, and deservedly gets the atten­tion, but I think the lat­ter would do bet­ter if not delib­er­ately “hid­den” as an Easter Egg behind one obscure link. Together they are the most tech­ni­cally com­plex and demand­ing sites I’ve ever designed & built, so I’m happy with any atten­tion they get.

www.TristramShandyMovie.com

The first of two sites for the excel­lent Michael Win­ter­bot­tom film. On one level Tris­tram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is an adap­ta­tion of the 18^th Cen­tury novel The Life and Opin­ions of Tris­tram Shandy: Gent. Take a step back, and on another level it’s about an Eng­lish film crew shoot­ing an adap­ta­tion of the 18^th Cen­tury novel The Life and Opin­ions of Tris­tram Shandy: Gent. Take in account many of the actors play ver­sions of them­selves, and the whole thing quickly becomes… well, all post­mod­ern ‘n’ shit.

So my boss had bril­liant idea: in addi­tion to a “nor­mal” movie pro­mo­tional site, we would cre­ate an imag­i­nary ver­sion of my com­puter desk­top. So you can read my email, check out dis­carded designs in the trash can, etc. We thought it would be self-explanatory, but wor­ried peo­ple have actu­ally been call­ing & email­ing Pic­ture­house that some­thing has gone wrong with their com­put­ers and their emails are on the web. So I guess I must have done my job well! It’s a trick to make a fake yet func­tional Win­dows desk­top using a Mac, believe me. It uti­lizes prac­ti­cally every sin­gle thing I know about Flash.

But nec­es­sary to the joke is a “real” movie site. So Pic­ture­house gets two sites out of me for the price of one. But that’s all good, because I’ve really enter­tained myself by trans­lat­ing 21^st Cen­tury internet-ese into jokey 18^th Cen­tury lan­guage. Shhh… here’s the work in progress.

A sub­ject wor­thy of a col­lege paper: we’ve taken to call­ing the first a “fake” movie site, com­plete with actual scare quote ges­tures made with our fin­gers. But here’s the poseur: we’ve also found our­selves doing the same with the “real” site. So, don’t they sort of can­cel each other out?

Finally the penny drops. WBShop.com Ver­sion II launches today, after sev­eral years (!!!) of development.

Waaaay back in 2001, not long after start­ing at New Line, I got the oppor­tu­nity to design the offi­cial Warner Bros. online store (long story short: it replaced the failed brick ‘n’ mor­tar stores). It was a huge mar­quee name for my port­fo­lio, and way beyond my skills and expe­ri­ence at the time. It… uh, sucked. But I can con­sole myself by say­ing that was about 4,372 years ago in web-design time.

So at some point, I don’t recall when, my boss began the ambi­tious project of redesign­ing the whole thing from top to bot­tom, for not just aes­thet­ics (my depart­ment) but also func­tion­al­ity (not my depart­ment). As Lead Designer, my role in the project was to, well, design every­thing. But there are numer­ous sources of input, some I can debate and some I sim­ply have to obey. There were sev­eral times when I thought my part of the job was “in the can”, only for the whole process to grind up again all over again. In the midst of all this, my col­leagues were stug­gling with the tech­ni­cal side of things (e-commerce func­tion­al­ity, etc). This went on for some years.

So it was a long, tough expe­ri­ence for me. Once upon I time I was quite pleased with it, and couldn’t wait for it to launch. But then a new E-Commerce Man­ager chipped in with some bull­shit sta­tis­tic say­ing that users (which some of us call “peo­ple”) were .0013% more likely to click on a red but­ton than a blue one. Hence the red but­tons. A com­plete vio­la­tion of my color scheme, which con­tributed to the WB brand­ing as well as drew the eye to the prod­ucts for sale. Even worse, I did ear­lier ver­sions of red but­tons that were more leg­i­ble and pretty, and they were nixed in favor of what you see now: $&#^$ red but­tons all over the place. It may be the first web site with acne.

That’s not my only grudge. I didn’t build any­thing (mean­ing stuff like image opti­miza­tion, HTML cod­ing, etc.), which should be a good thing because I’m a designer, not a devel­oper, Jim. But look­ing at how these web­mon­keys chose to build it, it’s clear to me that I know more about HTML then they do and that’s just wrong. Does it take for­ever to load in your browser? I wash my hands.

Oh well, it’s finally up there for the whole world to see and com­mit com­merce with. What an anti-climax.

Another movie site: Ush­pizin. My early designs for this one were look­ing pretty good, and I felt unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally con­fi­dent about them. Part of one con­cept sur­vives as a com­puter desk­top wall­pa­per; I actu­ally think my title treat­ment is quite nice, per­haps even good enough for a movie poster. I’m not crazy about what Pic­ture­house came up with, but pre­sum­ably their mar­keters know what they’re doing.

It’s such an incred­i­ble amount of work for one per­son to do all this. So when it came time to crank the whole thing out in Flash, I quickly lost my enthu­si­asm as the inevitable frus­tra­tion kicked in. As usual, I hate it. But I’ll give it some time and see if I come around.

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.