Thursday, 5 March 2009

Horizontal navigation styles

I'm noticing more and more horizontal navigations at the moment - mostly good ones!

My favourites are:
The 15belowproject which works particularly well with the sound on.

Uniqlo is another example, although it hurts my eyes a little!

Adidas have also made use of a similar nav for their new Originals site.

I think these examples work well because there is a reliance on images to navigate around rather than words. Particuarly Uniqlo and Adidas that are promoting a 'look' or style, it's a nice way to achieve it without forcing people to think about what they're looking for. Hovering over the left and right arrows is a simple and easily understood method of scrolling left and right.

I've also come across Simon Hoegsberg's site for a photographic installation. He took photos of people walking across a bridge in Berlin from the same position for 2 weeks and displayed them end to end on a wall. This is a great way to replicate the wall effect online - although unconventional, using the thumbnails across the bottom to instigate the movement above feels intuitive.

Kotsego have a blog post on how to make unconventional navigations work and I've used a couple of their examples.

On the topic of unconventional navigations, I love the Beastie Boys website using a dial to turn content up and down without having to scroll. One day every site will have one :)
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