We recently finished a Flash site for the author Lauren St John. She is best known for her popular book “The White Giraffe” but has a wealth of non-fiction, other childrens’ fiction and journalism to her name. It was an intriguing journey – one of those projects where the more we discovered about the client, the more it became a fascinating world to inhabit for a while.

Read on to find out what we did on the practical front to make Lauren’s work come to life… including an interactive realtime African game reserve, slide-out audio player and seamless layered navigation.

VISIT SITE

It all started when Steve had the idea of an interactive game reserve where the animals featured in the childrens’ books titles would act as clickable links to explore the books, aiming at the target audience of 9-11 year-olds. This is almost exactly what Lauren had in mind, so she asked us there and then to take the project on.

Nancy did some incredible illustration work, which was broken into layers and controlled by parallax scripts – so the foreground moves faster than the background. We added a realtime sky whose colour would change according to the time of day of the visit – including the sun which would rise in the east and set in the west, the moon and stars who begin to glow around 8pm and get brighter until around 11pm. Minute attention to detail? Yes… but that’s what we do. And our client loved it.

Lauren’s adult audience needed some love too, of course. She happens to be a rather fine photographer too, and looking through her collections, Steve found a good number of useable photos – setting the atmosphere perfectly. 

One shot in particular, called “Zen” triggered a nice idea for the Non-Fiction landing page – to create backgrounds for each category that would swap on rollover. This gave a nice feeling that the site was taking on the character of each side of Lauren’s work… as we found, when she’s in “golf mode”, she’s REALLY in golf mode, so the site had to echo this to stay true to Lauren’s personality.

Steve’s dad is a golf course architect, so he managed to pinch a lovely sunset shot of one of his courses in Turkey as the backdrop to the “golf” section.

Moving into these sections reveals another layer of navigation, making it very easy to get around. You can click on book covers, explore every detail – reviews, why Lauren wrote it etc., and either go back, or simply use the dynamically-generated menus to continue browsing. Its all pretty smooth.

A final touch in the portfolio site was to add a slide-out audio player to handle book excerpts and interviews.

To complete the site, we delivered a nicely styled WordPress blog so she could stay in touch with her fanbase.