Parrish Hanna

Parrish required a personal website that created a stage for him to discuss and highlight his professional theories, thought processes and general experiences. Working with the brilliant Daniel Sauter (UIC Art & Architecture) again, the direction came out of a need to make, what would typically be a very boring and “wordy” site, into something much more interesting and innovative.

Therefore, we focused on typography and movement. The UI consists of a plane and a grid of every page laying flat on it. Any internal link the user follows does not load a new page, but rather moves the entire plane and grid to the appropriate “slide”. This movement is not only intriguing, but begins to create interesting layouts since a portion of each adjacent “slide” peaks into the browser window.

Development Notes
Because of the nature of the site, I built a custom content management system (CMS) with PHP/MySQL to work specifically with the difficult front-end layouts. One of the most interesting features no one would see is that Parrish only has to update the basic content in the CMS and the front-end will determine which of the three layouts it should use based on images, text, files, etc. The very cool sliding feature uses the MooTools JavaScript library. This would have gotten a little hairy without it.

Final Thoughts
A text-based website does not have to be boring.

[ Visit the Parrish Hanna site ]