Saturday 12 January 2013

To Parallax or not?


I’m going to start by summing this up first: Let me say that I will at some point design a small parallax site for my portfolio cause I do think it’s somewhat cool. I can’t say how much beyond that I will go, so I would like to get some feedback from the design masses as to:
  • ·      What do you think about Parallax?
  • ·      What type of client would it be good for?
  • ·      Have you ever, or how many and what types of client have you done it for?


Here’s Why:
So at this point in my design education I am at the door of entering my 4th and final term. In our 1st term we were presented with the concept of Parallax Scrolling Websites.

It was very interesting and different from a design point of view, and a couple of my classmates embraced it and actually did a project in it. But I had some difficulties getting my head around the “what I will call value proposition”. Essentially I couldn’t define what sort of client I might design with it for.

Fast forward to term 3, and in our web interactivity development class we got to try our hand at creating the basic parallax scrolling effect. But I still had the same difficulty, so I asked my teacher what sort of client was it suited for, and had his company developed any parallax sites for anyone.

His response was it was probably best geared towards design/arts based type clients and clients wanting a small site (limited pages), and no they had not as yet done one for a paying client.

I have done a degree of researching on the Internet to try and answer/understand my issue, and I have seen many examples of parallax sites, some good some bad, but very little information as to why the choice was made. I have found a couple of sites that actively promote that they do parallax, but they don’t offer their criteria for when it is appropriate to use.

There is an aspect of a scrolling parallax site that puzzles me. We have been taught that generally when designing webpages, you don’t want them to be to big, because scrolling through to much information will cause a viewer to lose interest. It seems to me that a parallax website flies in the face of this. Yes they are very graphical, but I know that now having viewed quite a lot of them, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. So why do I see this as being promoted as the next best thing on the Internet?

3 comments:

  1. Hey Victor ... nice work on the blog and portfolio sites.

    I was doing the social media thing for Social Media class and I had a chance to look through your online work a bit and found some interesting stuff.

    I agree somewhat with what you say about the dubious nature of parallax web design being the wave of the future.

    I think there is a niche for it, but as the instructor noted, parallax seems mostly to be used to demonstrate the developers skill rather than a consistent way to showcase a commercial enterprise.

    That said, when you search for "parallax websites" the commercial ones you find are high end retailers ... fashion and accessories and the like.

    I can also see its usefulness for the informational graphics type of website. Lots of illustrations and small amounts of text utilized to impart some information quickly in a graphical way would be a good fit for parallax design.

    I find trying to read paragraphs of text disconcerting on parallax, the shifting fields of view can actually be dizzying when you're trying to read, everything scrolling at different rates.

    So yeah, not really the "next big thing", but probably still a handy tool to have in your web design and development toolbox.

    So anyway, keep up the good work Vic ... enjoyed working in various teams with you in the past and hope to collaborate with you in the future.

    Mitch

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  2. I say parallax is an interactive treat. It adds a bit more dimension to site, though if it takes away from the purpose of the site then it's a fail.

    Advertising seems to work the best, and when it sticks to one theme [say, an underwater scene, or a pop bottle]. There was one I saw, Dutch designer I think, that kept switching themes. It had a wavy line that the viewer followed, but it was still too much to look at.

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  3. I actually didn't even know what was a parallax nor heard of it before and at first it seems really cool and all but I can understand why they aren't that popular around the net.

    I learned that it's pretty bad sero wise but I think it would be something cool and fun to have on a portfolio for people that haven't seen one before.

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