Interactive Banner: Testing

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Interactive Banner: Actionscript

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Interactive Banner: Multiples

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Interactive Banner: Style & Colour Choices

Part II: Scotland banner.

This banner will be made up of layers of colour, texture, historical artefacts and imagery that are able to clearly define its subject. I draw inspiration from the countries own flag (Scotland's cross of St. Andrew or 'Saltire'), its heather lined hills, water filled lochs, snowy mountain peaks, bustling cities and isolated, sheep filled islands. Tarton, wool, rock, mud, ice and snow could all be represenative of the banner's textural features.

I want to include as much historical reference as possible without over-crowding or over-complicating the design. Architectural, cultural, social and industrial history will be united with its very own natural history. Famous Scottish men and women will be displayed alongside lochs and mountains.

Interactive Banner: Style & Colour Choices

Part I: Product banner.

Due to the nature of the chosen item, the colours implemented will reflect its intended environment. Woodland, hillsides, moorland, dirt trails, caves, lakes and toepaths have inspired the colour choices for this banner ad. You can see this represented by the swatch below. Each of these colours was sampled directly from photographs of each element and can be seen as a true representation of natural colouring.

I may included some of the textural features that go with these environments. Muddy footprints, leaves and twigs will be used to create borders and text areas rather than rigid boxes and pixel borders. Obviously the amount of frame decoration depends entirely on the size of the banner. The larger 'skyscraper' ads leave more room for stylization. The dimentions of the horizontal, standard banners leave it difficult to add anything other that content without disfiguring the legibility. Care and dilligence must be maintained.

Interactive Banner: Web Ads

As you will see from the prototype examples in the previous post, the banners remain fixed upon opening or refreshing of the browser. The interaction only begins when the user initiates its functions. I would like to now explain this desision.
As a frequent internet visitor I believe it is important not to upstage the content of a site with crude advertisements. Although some flash pieces are worthy of recognition and prominent display, many make painfully hard work out of simple transitions between sites and pages. You are bombarded with colours, shapes, sounds, text and speech which is usually completely unrelated to the site you are visiting. Many take different lengths of time to load and preload and without Macromedia plugins, Flash banners are rendered completely useless. That's without even beginning to mention the products themselves. The latest socio-technologially 'trendy' artefacts such as Apple's 'i' devices or the latest 'intelligent' beard trimmer seem to be haphazardly slapped anywhere that will take the commission. Where in television you can escape the ads by changing a channel or waiting for the break to end, nowhere seems to be safe ground within the net. With ever greater price-tags for this virtual real estate, soon we'll have no space for content and without control, browsing will become a fully interactive Yellow Pages rather than a tool for communication, publishing and information retrieval.

There are several kinds of web ads. Variations on these continue to appear:

Banner ads: standard horizontal 468x65 pixels.

Sidebar ads (aka skyscraper ads): vertical and scrollable, two to three times higher click-through rate than banners.

Pop-up and pop-under ads: annoying to close, but far higher click-through; higher cost for advertiser.

Floating ads: even more intrusive than pop-ups—they have sound and motion, and produce still-higher click-through numbers.

Unicast ads: a television-like 'commercial' with the advantage of clickability to the sponsor’s site.

Interactive Banner: Prototypes

Having developed the concept for the banners, it is now time to get a little feedback on the ideas. I have created a few prototype banners which test the user's interactivity. Download the .zip file through the link below, have a look and please leave some appropriate feedback.

Download: prototype.zip