Hello. I make things.
Avra Verde
As the primary sales tool for an exclusive new residential development located adjacent to Saguaro National Park in Arizona, this site is a photographic showcase of the award-winning architecture of Rick Joy.
It’s a large-scale, full-screen experience that simultaneously allows for an immersive dive into the landscape and architecture and quick access to the details and background of the venture. The navigation is secondary to the visual experience and falls away when it’s not in use.
The development team consisted of one designer (Dean DiSimone), one developer (Jason Horwitz), one photographer (Jeff Dey) and two architectural visualization consultants (March) and it took them four months to produce the site.
There are nine site sections, each with a different type of content ranging from image, to video, to vector maps.
The site has 75 images and 2 videos and a tiered system of image loading to mitigate the download times for the high-res imagery. For each image a desaturated low-res version is loaded while the high-res version loads in the background. Once the loading is complete the images are swapped.
A 12000px-wide panoramic navigational tool allows for optimal viewing of stunning photography and is unique to the project.
Because the large panoramics surpassed Flash’s internal limit for image sizes (4096 pixels) the developer created a library of custom code for tiling larger imagery in order to create seamless panoramic browsing.
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