Whether my subjective opinion of their projects is positive or negative, I'm always intrigued by the work of Stamen Designs. Like a piece of art, i don't always know how to feel about it on first encounter but am compelled to dig further into it and develop an opinion. Within their somewhat experimental UI's usually lies a nugget of genius worth panning for. Their latest effort for Trulia, the Snapshot Geo-Photo viewer, has that in spades. I initially felt powerless against the undulating wiggly-armed photo monsters, but after playing with the slider and options at the bottom it started to feel pretty comfortable even reminding me of a few elements of the Photosynth UI. Techcrunch describes it as being Jello-like. shop around for homes in your area to give it a try.
My thanks to Tom Carden of Stamen for sending this my way. Some comments from Tom-
It's an alternative view of the homes currently listed for sale on trulia.com, and first and foremost it's about browsing photos on a map in a playful way. You can search for any city in the USA and either click around the map, scroll the slider or just hit the big play button and sit back and watch!
Once again we're using Virtual Earth imagery in Flash and we're really pleased with effect we came up with. We think the black inverted maps really make the photos pop out.
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05-29-2008
Linear Mode
