Deep Zoom Playboy

I’ll be honest; I tried for good ten minutes to think of a funny/clever/witty title for this post.  In the end though, I decided that the current iteration said everything I wanted to say better than some pun or double entendre.

It seems the saucy minxes over at Vertigo have been busy cooking up a surprise for us all.  They’ve taken the design know-how and Silverlight expertise they exhibited in the Hardrock Memorabilia Collection and applied it to the Playboy Magazines Archive (NSFW, though thankfully they’ve laid it out so that the articles are easy to read).  

 

They’ve made some interesting design and navigation choices, the scroll wheel doesn’t zoom, for instance.  Navigation is also a little confusing at first (hint: use the breadcrumb in the upper left hand corner).  Also note that the scroll bar on bottom is a bow tie…   For all of that though, once you learn how to get around, the site is a breeze; and of course, content is king (especially with some Seadragon goodness, liberally applied).

First announced at Mix 2009, this site along with the NCAA Basketball Tournament being webcast in Silverlight should garner impressive intstall numbers.  Just check out the buzz on Twitter.

-Kevin Hanes

Leo Burnett

This one’s been around for several years, but it’s still a delightful example of playful zooming design: the portfolio site for Leo Burnett.

I love the way the pencil just draws all over everything, and the swooping trails it makes as you zoom in and out.

Pretty in Ink

MSN has put together a fun little celebrity tattoo browser using Deep Zoom. Lots of nice UI details, like how the photos rotate as you drag them around, and bounce off the walls if you throw them. I also like the way the filtering works: the selected photos move to the center and the remaining ones are scattered around the edges. My only complaint is the discontinuity between the photo selection mode and the photo zooming mode.

Infinite Canvas

I’ve been a fan of Scott McCloud since Understanding Comics. In his follow-up, Reinventing Comics, he proposes that the web could finally break comics out of their paper cage, allowing them to grow in whatever direction best fits them. He called this notion the infinite canvas, and even went so far as to discuss some of the technological ramifications that underlie Seadragon (and other similar zooming systems) today.

So, for the most recent Live Labs Out of the Box Week, I built a comic creator/viewer and called it Infinite Canvas. It’s all JavaScript (not Seadragon Ajax, but similar), even on the server side, where I’m using AppJet. Some early adopters have already created comics in it, so come check it out, and tell your comic friends about it!

More generally, it’s also an exploration into how we create and consume content in a zooming world. I look forward to continuing to explore these ideas in this and other domains.

bio-bak (NSFW)

Bio-bak is an amazing zooming/panning artwork/game/portfolio/thing with a bizarre sense of humor. If you’re not offended by crude language and imagery, I highly recommend checking it out; lots of good food for thought in terms of zooming interface, storytelling and design.

Etsy Time Machine

Etsy is a cool site for individuals and small shops to sell their handmade goods; sort of a virtual street fair for the whole world. They’ve got a number of delightfully playful ways to discover products, my favorite being the Time Machine, which allows you to zoom through an infinite spiral of recently posted items. Try the scroll wheel (Windows only, unfortunately); also try grabbing one of the items and throwing it around. Fun stuff.

Prezi

As Daniel points out in a recent comment, another interesting zooming site is Prezi (formerly ZuiPrezi), a web app for creating presentations based on zooming rather than slides.

The concept of laying your presentation out at various scales and rotations on a single infinite canvas and zooming/panning from place to place is a great one; it helps break you out of the linearity of the typical slide show presentation. They’ve also got some fun UI touches, like the way their main menu is all zooming/rotating as well.

NEC BIGLOBE

NEC BIGLOBE has a new photo album viewer that uses Deep Zoom, but adds a hyperbolic interface. A bit disconcerting at first, but more fun than your typical album view. Feels like some sort of deep sea creature made out of photos.

(via)

Kinetic Typography

While moving text has been around for a while, it seems to have really exploded in recent years. Here’s a nice short one:

…and this one’s a bit more involved.

All the zooming and panning, along with the interesting context shifts, seems right up Seadragon’s alley. I’d love to see us exploring how to enable this kind of storytelling in an interactive fashion (rather than the canned experience a video is).

Zoomism

Ben Voos has created a fantastic demo of the possibilities of zooming UI at Zoomism.com (though unfortunately it doesn’t support the scroll wheel on the Mac). If you’re trying to show someone what zooming content is all about, send them there.