As for usability, I have not been able to replicate the issue of text shooting off the screen, nor did it show it self in testing or feedback from users. We have only had positive feedback in the enjoyment of exploring the picture map and discovering the fun connections between images and text.

Thanks for your comments, clearly there is grey. But I’m sure we can agree to disagree.
Stephen

Please be sure not to confuse comments posted by other readers of this blog with my own – I don’t represent the views of the readers of this blog. As I mentioned in my post, and to yourself on the night, I had a lot of good things to say about the Elwood Jeans site.

However, as stated, I personally didn’t think it was very usable. To elaborate, I had real trouble navigating the site and finding anything; and when I did locate some information, the paragraph that I was in the middle of reading shot off-screen without any warning, and then disappeared when I returned to it. I was also amazed that there was no facility to turn off the soundtrack. These are not things that have any relation to whether I am a customer of Elwood Jeans.

Good on SEE for pushing the boundaries with this interface – I applaud the attempt at exploring new ways of interacting with the Web, and the recognition that you’ve achieved with this award is confirmation of that. But these are issues that transcend the target market of a site; they have nothing to do with the business’s target audience. Art may be subjective, and design can be also. But there are some basic usability principles that are very black and white and have nothing to do with opinion or with a site’s target market.

Sites like jkrowling.com go some way to dispel the myth that a site cannot be good-looking if it is made to be accessible or usable. They are not mutually exclusive criteria.

You make note that the site is very successful with its target audience, because of the design. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind elaborating on how the success of the site is measured, and whether it was usability tested with any representatives from the target market? I would suggest that by addressing some of these issues it has the potential to be even more successful.

I hope you find this feedback useful; congratulations on winning the award.

Matt

I quite enjoyed reading the rants of your tarnished audience, so bitter at the Elwood website.

I think the internet is a communication medium which is customisable to perform varying functions and displaying messages. It is much less about “educating old-school designers about modern techniques”, and more about achieving the communication objectives for the brand, tailoring the experience for the target audience.

When working with brands like NAB, GSK, Yamaha, Sensis, and Vic Gov, we at SEE are constantly producing sites that use tableless CSS, are highly accessible with well developed and intuitive user interfaces. This is done because the content and the user experience require it, not just to be compliant (or to marvel at the site when viewed without page styles).

However when designing a site for Elwood, the communication objectives are quite different. You and your readers seem to be criticising a site for which they have no understanding of the brand or the brief. Below is a very short extract of the client brief:

The objective for creating http://www.elwoodjeans.com was to create an Elwood destination online, where the story and history of the brand was able to take focus, over and above the product itself. We wanted to create a place where Elwood devotees could discover the philosophy behind this great Australian ‘rock n roll’ denim company.

This is clearly a destination website, it’s not transactional, it’s not content driven, it’s not even product focused. It is an experience-based site, where story was to be “discovered” by Elwood “devotees”.

So to fully explain, it is a site where people who already love Elwood, (a demin company with it’s history routed in “Rock’n’Roll”) could visit to explore its story through images, animation and interaction.

You guys need realise that every brand doesn’t need to adhere to the same guidelines. This site is very successful with it’s targeted audience, and quite frankly the fact your readers think it’s “bollocks” means we have probably done something right!

But Matt you make a good point though, the Create awards are for excellence in design. Perhaps next year, instead of the create awards, SitePoint should consider being involved in awards more focused around accessibility and information design.

giving a design award for another CSS porfolio site just seems like scraping the barrel to me?

It should probably be viewed in the context that this is an award being given by a graphic design magazine, not a web magazine. Concepts like semantic and accessible markup have been largely ignored by folks (either on purpose, like I mentioned, or out of ignorance) in this industry in Australia until now. It might sound sad, but the fact that there is a site built with standards even listed as a finalist is a step forward in terms of educating old-school designers about modern techniques.