Mining - Flash interactive timeline

The website is getting close to completion now. I've made my interactive piece - the Bestwood timeline which hopefully will provide a more interesting point of information for younger viewers.

On this occasion it was the aesthetics that I had trouble with more than the actual Flash coding.

Using the Cadbury World experience as my inspiration (a great vibrant piece that will surely attract younger viewers) I tried out some layouts for the timeline.

This first one was a little too rigid. It appears a little dull.

This second one has more visual interest due to the bendy nature of the lines however I feared it may be too over the top?

I arrived at a compromise between the two, it has the curvy lines, but then I tiled it too with a slate wall image. At this stage, I still wasn't entirely satisfied however. It seemed to be a little bland.

I went into Photoshop and added smudges, and dirty marks so that the coal mine theme was more evident.

When it came to the Flash motion, I wanted to make it roll over, roll out and have jazzy effects popping up. I thought a good tie in with the rest of the site would be to use a glow effect in the colours that the Bestwood site uses. This was all achievable through setting up functions that detected when the mouse hovered and also whether a rewind action was in use.

Something of importance was making the text legible. We intend to repeat the information below this Flash piece for those who do not have the Flash plug-in and so I decided to go for a slightly jazzier font too. After several attempts at various sizes I decided upon Market Deco. It has a classy look but also a dated feel, again fitting in with the mining theme.

To sum up, I feel the mining piece has gone well. I particularly like the animations that appear - they are snappy, contrast against the white background and should attract the user's attention. The text information is short and to the point and the icons help visualise the information. A younger user should find this a more pleasant way of finding out information.

@