It looks really impressive and I realize this is a creative showpiece, but is anyone else getting tired of all this "swiping" being forced upon users who aren't even using touchscreens? Between this and Microsoft's Metro swipes, it's getting a little ridiculous. I really hope this doesn't become an even bigger trend because it's horrible for usability.
Yes, especially considering that this particular piece isn't available on touchscreens. The click-and-drag experience is even worse with a laptop trackpad.
I don't think it's quite tired yet. This is a gorgeous execution of the technique, especially considering the interactive elements (Play close attention the maps portion...really nice 3D effect there).
As far as marketing goes I think it beats out the typical static landing page.
Perhaps I'm being thick here, but I wasn't able to find anywhere this is spelled out. Care to elaborate?
Also, fun fact: Copying/pasting the code in that minified file either results in weirdness or complete crashing from Notepad++, depending on the file encoding setting.
I also didn't find any references in the minified code, but clearly this was done by WeAreHive, a small boutique agency in London.
From their website:
"We were brought in by adam&eveDDB to work on interactive pop-up book designed to showcase the talent and innovation of Google’s Creative Sandbox Gallery, and built entirely in HTML5 and CSS3."
Yes, I wasn't disputing the authors of the project, merely where it could be found written-out in the source. I figured it was encoded into the minified variables, but couldn't find anything indicating such.
According to martinp, the code was removed after his initial post.
I should retract the last line of my previous comment.
While the site does indeed has flash, it's just because the standard YouTube's player respecting previous selections (or lack thereof). I used to have YouTube as HTML5, but recently re-installed Chrome recently and I guess it went back to Flash as a default player.
Thank you, but I was actually asking about the "WE ARE HIVE" being spelled out as spaces in the minified JS file linked above. It seems to be gone now, though. :(
Google's recent websites for marketing - this and http://www.themobileplaybook.com/ - really stand out. Their production value is just amazing, and in case of Mobile Playbook, content is great too.
I'm a front end dev, and have worked on some big and gorgeous sites, but damn... I've been working on startups for a couple of years and feel like the web has moved massively in that time... who ever is making this stuff is amazing (although I assume this isn't a single man effort)
They're great if you're using desktop or iOS, but fall short if you use Google's own devices. The mobile playbook serves a phone view to the Nexus 7 tablet, and a broken desktop view to the Nexus 4.
Yes, Google, that's because you've blacklisted my perfectly good graphics driver and broken it for me (Chrome/Linux/Nvidia). Well played. How about next time you give ME that choice?
(I know about the workarounds. It's not my machine, I don't have root or sudo, and I can't be bothered to find out where Chrome is hidden on this mess of NFS-mounted filesystems. It used to work, now it doesn't. Story of the web.)
Don't feel bad, on my Nexus 4 I'm redirected to a mobile subdomain and 404'd.
But you probably mean something along the lines of:
"Increasingly, users are accessing the web from a mobile, therefore it's critical that your presence on the web is optimized for mobile devices. Studies have shown that 2/3rds of users will not return to a site that is not optimized for mobile."
That was floated next to a Flash video embed with no fallback. But here's the fallback on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja7abx3OPOQ It was easy to find once I opened the whole presentation in a desktop browser with Flash support, click-dragged back to the page, clicked the magnifying glass icon to spawn the popup, then the More Info tab, then the YouTube icon in the lower-left corner of the video to 'view on YouTube'.
I'd send you a link, but there isn't one. It's all one URL. And you're probably not part of the 1/3 that will return to a site that isn't optimized for mobile anyway.
To add to the irony, it didn't work for me on Chrome v23. True, not the first time I see Chrome struggling to read fancy HTML5 sites (Google's Exquisite Forest was another one, and some areas on Chrome Web Lab are definitely better experienced with Firefox).
And yeah, I had to install flash in order to run the videos on this site...
Great fun, but I'd quite like to link to a certain 'tab' and send it in an email. Sadly, it looks like I'll have to email instructions on how to get to that 'tab', which will be tedious.
