Second Street Gallery
www.secondstreetgallery.org
The primary goal of new website for Second Street Gallery (SSG) in Charlottesville, Virginia was to streamline content and navigation into a user friendly interface, while also creating a new aesthetic that compliments the gallery’s exhibitions and commitment to the Virginian art community. I designed the site to be literally reflective of the gallery's interior space by using ActionScript's reflection class to replicate the polished concrete floor. While the logo was not designed by myself, I designed and created the stencil concept and story to give the logo more life and interacitvity. In addition to the concrete texture and shadows; movement of the content, the stencil pre-loader, and the news poster, all engage the audience and invite visitors into SSG’s online space.
In addition to the various design elements, I also took advantage of this project to learn and incorporate additional web elements and effects. The site utilizes both SWFFit and SWFAddress. The former is a script that resizes your Flash movie based on the browser size, but allows the developer to place a minimum requirement that has the ability to call the browser's scroll bar if necessary. SWFAddress provides deep-linking in Flash, which is important for book-marking capabilities, Google Analytics usage on specific content with-in a single Flash movie, using browser history and reload buttons, and finding specific content in Flash via major search engines. Lastly, the entire project is built upon an XML database in which I have incorporated Rainbow XML Editor to enable the client to update the site independent of me. Launched November 2009.
