My involvement in the production of this website was rather low. I did was a calendar application for the programme section, but apparently, they don’t use it at all, so it’s empty all the time. I believe the rest of the site was done by Fry and Boris.
I think this was Parsek’s first site running on the CP2 architecture.
A minisite that I don’t really like that much. I wasn’t really on the same page with the new designer on this one, so the result was a bit questionable. The TV spot featured the new Mégane driving across the landscape on the Moon, trying to show how well it stuck to the road. So the minisite was set in something that was supposed to be a collosal empty space station with a floating thing, which was a bit of a Lenny Kravitz video rip-off, serving as a projector. In the background, there were a few silhouettes exported from Walk Designer kind of jumping around and stuff.
Anyway, I had a hard time doing this, because using 3D renders in Flash is really tricky if you want to keep the Flash small, and especially if you don’t have the whole thing completely worked out in advance. I had a hard time explaining this to the designer and I ultimately failed. He basically just handed me the pre-rendered elements and I had to figure out how to use them. Not to mention that the design didn’t provide any way to include the content at first.
This minisite is basically a mix of things we’d done in the past: expanding menus, tsunami menus, Japanese type, the spring effect…
I think I did most of it, but I remember I knew I won’t be able to finish it for some reason and I triend to make the code as readable to Fry as possible, so he could add the e-card application and finish adding the content.
I remember programming this riding a bus to Nova Gorica where I was giving a lecture at Mobilatorij .
A web application that was used on several Parsek sites, including the election campaign website of LDS (Liberal Democrats of Slovenia) and the Renault Slovenija website. The application generates clickable points on the map according to dynamically loaded coordinates defined by the Gauss-Krüger system. This way, the points needn’t be positioned manually, but can be loaded from an external XML source, such as a static file or dynamically generated from a database resultset.
I think this was one of the coolest websites we did at Parsek. Nordcross is a production company of Igor Zupe and Sašo Podgoršek who have done a lot of cool stuf for NSK over the years. We tried to get away from the standard website interface and create something more experimental. The result was pretty cool, especially for those times, and it was a big technical achievement, since it was done with the new Flash 5 and featured QuickTime video. Although the two had been used before, the all-flash site with QuickTime seemingly embedded into it was a breakthrough at the time. After some time, when new browsers came out, the “video over flash” didn’t work anymore, so I decided to try to rebuild the site in Flash 6 as an exercise, enabling the viewing of videos again by using the new video feature in Flash. The site was designed by Ozi, the video preview animations were done by Žiga, the desktops were done by both of them, and the background music was provided by 300.000 V.K.
After heavy negotiations between Parsek and Renault Slovenija, they agreed on redesigning their existing and very out-of-date website. I think this is one of the sites I’m most proud of, becuase by then, I had enough experience with what should be done dynamically and how. It was a big step forward in the sense that the structure was so well planned, that there is still no need to replace the site.
In addition, it makes very good use of the internet as a medium, offering many different services that makes life at least a bit easier for owners (and future owners) of Renault vehicles. It’s definitely not an advertising site, but a service for their customers.
In spite of huge amounts of content on the site, it looks light and it’s easy to navigate. What I like most about it is that, once it was done, there was never any need to modify the site’s skeleton. The textual and visual content is fed via JSP generated XML and managed through Parsek’s SeeEdit CMS. How the site’s layout works is cross-browser voodoo that only Fry can do.
This cute little photostory was done as a splash for the home page of the Renault Slovenija website. It promoted an edition of the Twingo car which boasted a preinstalled sound system. After a fun photo session, Ozi designed the individual screens and I did the cool transitions.
I was very uncomfortable with the general atmosphere at Parsek at the time, and I tried to take home as much work as possible. I remember working on this one mostly at home.
This game, done for the insurance company Slovenica, was made to promote the insurance plans for children in school. Since kids like getting into all sorts of accidents at school, we made a first-person paper fight between schoolmates. It was based on a game we’d done before as Parsek’s New Year’s greeting card, although I rewrote the engine for this one.
The nice illustrations were done by Andrej and I very much enjoyed animating the characters, since they were so cute and devilish at the same time.
The controls are: mouse for aiming and throwing, spacebar to duck behind the desk.
The first website we did for a Japanese client was for the organisation that is the authority on the art of ikebana in Japan. It was done in collaboration with the now ex-company DentsuFUSE. We’d gotten a visit from Dentsu’s designer Matty Sallin and programmer Krishna Manda.
Matty presented the idea of an abstract flower-like menu that would react to the user’s selection by sheding a petal which transformed into a multi-angle circular submenu. Upon pressing one of the submenu items, the submenu transformed into a rectangle which held the chosen content.
The color scheme changed randomly every time the site was reloaded and the background was a flower structure with petals of the same hue but randomly offset lightness and saturation. It was a beautiful, elegant, poetic.
The content featured all sorts of gadgets: Interactive maps, store, a 3-layered draggable timeline, ikebana courses search engine…
Technically, it was a huge challenge because it had to be done in Japanese, so I went to the FlashForward 2001 seminar in Amsterdam to find out how to do Japanese in Flash 5, and nobody really knew, so I basically had to figure it out on my own.
The static and dynamic text was achieved by using a Japanese version of Flash 5 which featured support for the ShiftJIS support. It had to be installed on a Japanese edition of Windows. So I worked in the regular edition and exported on a VMWare virtual machine with the Japanese editions of Windows and Flash.
There were many parties involved in the project and it was so poorly managed that I’m actually surprised that we not only finished it, but managed to do it extremely well. But all in all, the process was a nightmare and it was the first seed of my eventual departure from Parsek.
This project was a pretty nice attempt at usable interface design. It’s a search engine for used cars, which was quite advanced at the time, and now, looking at it, it’s still pretty cool. The goal was to design a usable three-step, one-page flash interface for the search engine. At that time, most of the similar search engines featured HTML-form based interfaces, which reloaded the page at every step.
Since this was one of my first exercises in interface design, it’s nice to see that I already saw a faint glimmer of the “using data to modify data” principle. For example, the range slider, used to select year, engine power, mileage and price ranges, also serves as a bar graph, showing the number of vehicles available for each step.
It also has nifty DHTML tricks, all courtesy of Fry. The one I like most is the comparison windows that arrange themselves horizontally and scroll together to keep the vehicle characteristics inline.
If you ask me, this is the site where the attention to detail and the dedication of each member of Parsek’s team is most apparent. (Some improvements as well as some bugs have been introduced into the interface since I left)
This game is one of the few things I’ve done with Ajdin. The deadline was completely unreal, so all the plot elements weren’t really worked out and we just went with whatever came up, which would account for the game being a bit bizzare to some people.
The game is promoting Abanka’s online banking service Abanet, so the goal is to free up the long queues at the bank, teleporting the people into the internet. When you clear a queue, the grateful girl at the counter blows you a kiss, which gets you bonus points. If a queue is filled up completely, it gets frozen and the customers frozen/cocooned (?!?) making it impossible to gain more points from it.
At the time, Ajdin was in his pixel-art phase and he did the whole design pixel by pixel in Photoshop. But there was so little time, that I did all the corrections, the missing elements, soundtrack and sound effects myself. We literally had to finish it in under a week. The bank is actually a pixelized replica of an actual bank in Ljubljana.
If I remember correctly, this microsite for the Renault Trafic was designed dy Daka and it was done so quickly that if I didn’t have backups, I wouldn’t remember it at all.
A christmas e-card card for Peugeot, featuring a nice animation and a questionnaire application.
NPJ was a company that developed a recommendation engine for online stores, call centers, etc. By the time Jan and I finished this promo CD, the company had already closed down.
The CD featured a nice intro with an ending that let you choose between the informative or interactive part. The latter was a game where you tried to recommend products to ppeople. The trick was that the same people appeared in different environments (at work, at home, partying, etc.), which meant you had to choose the right product for the person based on their current state of mind. It was supposed to make you appreciate the power of their intelligent recommendation engine.
Download presentation - 4 MB
This minisite was trying to be very dynamic and stylish in a fashion-model kind of way. The nice menu is what I like most about it. It also featured some nice multi-layering of the car photo vs. drawn sections. The dramatic score was done by Jan.
I like this game very much, not just because it looks very nice, but also because Jan and I finally found common ground around that time. We did some very cool stuff together and I was a bit sorry to see him leave to pursue his studies, because he was probably the most professional and efficient people I’ve worked with. He always came up with good ideas, but also knew exactly how to execute them.
This game we did for Mitsubishi Heavy Indiustries Europe was inspired by PipeMania, where you have to lay the longest pipe possible from one point to the other, while avoiding the water catching up with you. Herethe pipes carried gas from the natural gas station to the power plant, both built by MHIE, of course.
The game was fairly simple to do and it made very good use of pre-rendered 3D. The musical score and sound effects were both done by Jan.
A flash promo for Scient Japan. I have no idea if they ever used it or not, but it might have been just part of Parsek’s pitch.
This was part of an unsuccessful pitch for what I think was to be some kind of Japanese online gaming portal. It also had something to do with environmental issues, hence the game’s theme. You try to shoot the evil worms that want to eat your trees. I like the tree animation I did very much. Otherwise, the game was designed by Ozi.
The Parsek Away Team in Japan thought it would be a great idea to have 300 or so copies of the yet non-existent Parsek promo CD sent over to Japan the next day. I remember giving up after working for 30 hours straight. Definitely not a nice way to treat your co-workers. Eventually, though, it was finished.
This was definitely one of the cooler minisites we did at Parsek. The concept was that, since the car used smart-cards to remember the driver’s preferences, we used a DNA-like menu. The composition was very peculiar and multi-layered but it featured all the standard gadgets, like a 360° external and internal view, color selector, image gallery, desktops, a screensaver, and e-cards. The music was done by Jan and the motion graphics by Ozi.
Because the internet teaser campaign wasn’t done by Parsek, it was clear that we still hadn’t gained enough of the client’s trust, but they were so pleased with the result that from then on, they’ve been collaborating with Parsek exclusively on all internet projects. Following the launch of this minisite, we redesigned the official Renault Slovenija site and did many more promotional minisites.
Although, I did suffer from heavy eyestrain and headaches while doing the site because of the constant flashing.
We also did a version of this minisite for Renault Japan, but they wanted us to lose the semi-transparent blue belt that covered the car because, apparently, customers kept asking them if they have the light-blue color in stock.
Personally, I’m not that impressed with this game for the online shopping portal, because the gameplay is a bit dull. You play the grandma that tries to catch as many falling products as possible, while avoiding the anchor, weight and such. It has its moments, though, like the grandma trying to catch her breath when she’s standing still, using her umbrella as a shield and the outro animation which reveals the fact that the game is actually the grandma shopping online using a high-tech VR setup.
Two flashier-than-powerpoint slideshow presentations for the launch of the Plénitude and Grey Chic product lines. We worked overnight marathon style on these one and I had to take a week off to heal my sore wrist.
During the production of this game, all sorts of funny events took place and I really enjoyed doing it. We had a photo session with Gašper and Samo, who were wearing their serious suits and striking poses for the camera, which were then used as reference for Ozi’s illustrations. Actually, your opponent in the game is a combination of Gašper and Samo, which is why I’m so amused when I play it, because it reminds me of that ridiculous photo session.
The look we were going for in the game was sort of a totalitarian corporatione totalitarianism, run by young playful people with a cool but aggressive approach to the market. Hmmm… Anyway, the game and expecially the game’s outro at the end sums up Parsek’s attitude perfectly.
This special New Year’s greeting card was also used to boast our backend know-how. Each recipient received a unique link with a personalized game. They were addressed by their own name and in their language. The Slovenian version was translated into English, Italian and French. This was all done by loading the data dynamically from a database.
This site was still done with Flash 4, because it was still too early to expect a high adoption rate of Flash 5. So I used the experience I gained from programming in Flash 5 to try to push Flash 4 to the limit with dynamically created menus and content. Because a lot of things still had to be updated manually, I tried to make it as simple as possible, especially because I refused to update the site myself.
The coolest thing about the site were the car galleries which featured custom animations for each car. For the x06 series, each car was set against an abstract background and then the rest of the image was built up in 4 steps based on the user’s actions. For the x07 series, the car was set in an enviroment and then the enviroment came alive in 4 different ways based on the user’s actions. Completely unnecessary, but at least it made some use of the huge space the car’s picure took up and it made the site extra cool.
One other achievement was the Flash interface for the accessories store. I don’t think that had been done before. The biggest challenge was creating an easy system to manually update the product thumbnails. Luckily, the product line didn’t change very often.
With new investors in the game, Parsek moved location to the very center of Ljubljana. Everybody got a hefty raise, the offices were amazing and the company slowly started going very corporate. The site we did for Parsek was much more serious and informative, but still retained the youthful and playful, yet at times cynical attitude that defined the company. It featured the new “square” logo and the dotted world map with 3.26 written on it. The site was flash-enhanced HTML, the design echoing the new dotcom yuppie times - faceless young techno-junkies taking over the world is how I would describe it.
The first game I ever did is incidentally my favourite one. It was inspired by a game called “Milk the Cow", where you had to fly over a grass plane and milk as many cows with your mouse.
Although the election campaign of our client, The Liberal Democrats Party of Slovenia, was generally very bland, but they were the first to use the internet as a medium for reaching potential voters, especially the younger ones.
The game’s concept is that the character of your choosing runs across a grassy plane, handing out flyers inviting people to vote. The people are represented as silhouettes, one of which is Kekec, a hero from old Slovenian movies. The obstacles that your character must avoid or jump over are symbols representing competing parties.
We laughed when we saw the characters that Ozi designed and animated, because the boy reminded us so much of him. We referred to them as Safet & Sanela, which was then changed to Tomaž & Milena for the official version.
I am to this day amazed at what we managed to pull off with the primitive scripting language in Flash 4.
Renault Slovenija was the first major project for Parsek and it has proven to be the most crucial and faithful one throughout the years. We did the first version in collaboration with Studio Marketing, who were doing all the advertising work for Renault Slovenija. The greatest challenge was freeing ourselves from the dictate of Studio Marketing’s designers, who, coming from the print media design, weren’t able to grasp the concept of designing for the web just yet. Soon, they were pesuaded to back off a bit, and the resulting website was very interesting. Weird, but in a good way.
Although, had I known, that my static-data Flash is going to keep me busy for the next few years, I’d think twice about doing it. Back then, we still hadn’t figured out that Flash (even version 4) could be programmed to load data dynamically, and the media could only be updated dynamically via Generator, which we couldn’t afford, so it was done in a lame static manner, that required me to open the Flash authoring environment, modify the content manually, export and finally upload the swf to the server. And all this every time Renault started or stopped selling a car with a particular engine, which was very often. And since they refused to finance a completely new website for about 3 years, I was updating the flashes manually at least once a week for a very long time. Needless to say, it was a good lesson and a damn good motive to learn about dynamic data.
This was one of those never-ending stories where I’m lucky that my involvement was minimal. It was a huge project for a tough client and it took forever to make. Basically, I only did a few Flash gadgets for the site, like the interactive maps and a webcam application. Pretty basic stuff, really, but at a time when Flash was used for “kewl” animated menus and buttons, these gadgets were actually useful.
Sinerga is a company that makes big LED display panels, one of which is placed very prominently placed in the city center. It’s so low-tech that I can’t believe it’s still there. Most probably because it has the same effect as internet banners, it’s always in your face, but you don’t even notice it anymore.
This site is such an obvious example of the enthusiasm Ozi and I had for Flash. The idea was to create the feeling of being on some kind of Times Square-like place. Every menu choice rotated the square and changed the color of the buildings. I find it funny now, but we were dead serious then. Since there were no vector plugins for 3D applications then, the rotating square was exported as wireframe images from a 3D application and then Ozi manually drew and colored vector versions of them in Illustrator. Actually, all four sides of the square were the same, with a building in the middle which carried a huge two-part LED display. The top featured Ozi’s wacky motion graphics and the bottom was reserverd for slogans which were covered by some kind of net to create a LED look.
Anyway, in the end, we had to tone everything down, because it was just too flashy, so we halved the size and removed the motion graphics. Notice that I haven’t mentioned the content yet? Exactly.
This project got us free advertising space for a few years on the “city’s main LED display” I mentioned earlier.
The very first client work I’ve ever done was this site for the Hepatitis B awareness and innoculation campaign, conducted by the Institute of Public Health. I’m completely amazed that it’s still online, considering it was done at a time when I still had a lot to learn about Flash and other internet technologies, so the production was basically me and Ozi trying to figure out how to make a pull-down menu in Flash and me taking the programmers’ instructions on how to post a form. I was also fiddling with some audio software back then, so I created a groovy but a bit menacing sound loop for the site.
This was my first project at Parsek back in 1998. The company was still trying to get serious clients and the first thing to do was to create a flashy website. Of course, the website was crap, spinning logos and everything, but still it was among the first of its kind.
Done in Flash 4, with an annoying background loop, my friend Olga doing fake japanese accent sound effects and featuring Ozi’s wacky animations, we basically just had a good time doing it. The news section was updated manually in Flash and then re-exported, and I think we did it twice.
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