Design Exploration - Expedition Titanic by Firstborn

I have chosen a new Firstborn site called Expedition Titanic which was featured in the November 2010 issue of Adobe Edge. The URL for Expedition Titanic is http://www.expeditiontitanic.com/

I tend to prefer educational/informative sites. I thought that the "We Choose the Moon" site ( http://wechoosethemoon.org/ ) was a great learning/exploration tool and I have found this site to be both fun and interesting to explore as well.

This site was created by Firstborn (http://www.fborn.com/ ) for RMS Titanic, Inc. which apparently is in the process of conducting an extensive survey of the wreck site... for profit naturally.

For the most part I like the Flash work coming out of Firstborn. Their designs are generally very clean looking and not overly cluttered with unnecessary elements. The Expedition Titanic site continues this trend. I think that it takes a lot of discipline not to load up the design with a lot of bells and whistles. Firstborn did a good job in this area.

I liked the use of the vertical column down to the wreck site depth with various facts and animations on the way down. I also enjoyed exploring the wreck site map and the various links to additional information. It is my opinion that a well thought out design can be a very effective teaching tool. The challenge, of course, is how to keep the site visitor interested and engaged. I thought that the use of videos, photos and animations in the site was well done, clean and fun to explore.

For the most part the site follows the "make it easy" design principle. It is pretty simple to navigate through the site with the exception of the "feeds" area where you apparently need to have a Facebook or Twitter account to view the daily progress reports. I found this page difficult to work/understand.

The site maintains a consistent look and feel throughout with the use of colors and design elements. The navigation bar is easy to locate to find and to use.