Award winning Photographer and Visual Artist Federica Ragusin wanted to rewamp her old 90's looking website and add a few cool effects to it. She wanted the website to have a portfolio flash-like look, showing a collection of her most important works.

Our Solution

We decided we would develop Federica's website to resemble as close a Flash application as possible BUT using the dynamicity offered by Javascript instead. We redesigned her logo and chose a color palette which is more appropriate for an artist's portfolio website. We then created a centered layout with a very dark tone and a greysh ornamental plants background. We identified five major sections which had to be further developed: an Artist page describing the artist's life and achievements, a Photo section showing a collection of Federica's works as an architectural photographer, a Web section showing her works as a Web Designer, an Exibits page outlining her career's exibits and shows, and an Articles page which gathers snapshots of magazines' articles about the artist. An Ajax contact form was also added to allow interested parties to contact the artist for freelance work.

Since our goal was to develop Federica's website in such a way that users had the impression of visiting a Flash site rather than a "regular" site, we had to find a way to navigate around the site without any page reload as is the case with a Flash app. The Scriptacolous Javascript framework, once again, made it all happen. The center screen is used as a base on which the several pages are "projected" as in a slideshow carousel. A plethora of switch-off/on and fading effects have been added to the mix. In addition, a new age tune plays and entertains users as they navigate around the site. A Javascript volume control box has been added to give users the possibility to stop, increase or decrease volume or pause the music playing in the background.

The result is a beatifully designed and minimalistically elegant website, utilizing the most advanced Flash-like Javascript effects made famous by the Scriptacolous framework.