2007 / August 26^th/ ISO50

I was shuffling through my ma.gnolia links for another site to feature and came along a site I stumbled upon a long time ago called ISO50 — a portfolio for Scott Hansen. I was once again blown away by the quality of work and deemed it necessary to write about it immediately.

The site is an all-flash site, but I think it works very well given the fact that it’s a fixed-height design. It also provides for the whole experience to be extremely smooth and flowing. I’m a big fan of choosing the right medium for the right job, and I think flash suites this site perfectly.

Style

The thing that hit me most about this site and the work contained is the definitive style Scott has developed for himself. I think the posters really start to define his style, and that transitions beautifully into other medium like T-Shirts. Not to mention I’m a sucker for that whole vintage-ish style.

Details

Even though this is a pretty simple site, Scott’s spent some time in minute details that really tie in the experience for me. For example: the squares on the left turn a different color after you’ve visited that item. Most people today don’t even use visited link styles: so it’s nice to see someone doing this still.

Color

The final point I’d like to showcase is the fact that his portfolio uses a color scheme. Most portfolios I see today use either a singular color or black and white for the design itself. This is understandable as each piece of work often has a different and potentially clashing color scheme. However, through the use of real-world textures and colors, I think Scott’s pulled of using a color scheme in a portfolio very well.

Nitpick

I have two very small nitpicks for this site. One, I’d like to be able to permalink to specific pieces of the portfolio, and two I really dislike sites that automatically play music in the background. I really think music needs to be an opt-in choice, not an opt-out choice.

Other than that, great site — and don’t forget to check out the ISO50 Store too!

1. 

   tom

   August 27^th | #

   I totally agree. After stumbling across Scott and his design & music, it was a bit of an epiphany. He really has a singular style and it’s very cohesive despite being an odd mix of very clean & technical visual elements mixed with overtly organic ones. What I also find interesting is his lack of a blog or any vehicle for a “voice”. With Scott, the proof is most definitely in the pudding and that’s not something you can really argue with.

   Oh yeah… Buy his CD for some chill music to design to!

2. 

   Kevin Crawford

   September 5^th | #

   Haha, I listen to his CD while working all the time.

   I love the “Recent News” and “Live Shows” headings done in flash at his sister-music site, http://tychomusic.com/

3. 

   Joel

   September 18^th | #

   Kyle, just wondering how one can create deep links in flash that work across all browsers, such that the location (uri in the address bar) is altered as you go through different links. This obviously needs to be done via javascript, and thus is equally important to sites (applications?) that implement ajax (properly) to alter screen content.

4. 

   Kyle

   September 18^th | #

   Hey Joel,

   There’s a number of ways — I know Adobe’s newest release of Flex 3 has a built in functionality for permalinking (through a javascript file and an Actionscript Library). Basically, the idea is to modify documentation.location.hash (which works in everything but Safari 2) so that your location becomes something like http://example.com/#/products/15 Your javascript then reads the hash on page load, sends it to the flash and the flash knows where to go.

   The old (and IMO better) mtv.com did this very well… but unfortunately they’ve gone a few steps back from that direction.

5. 

   Andy

   January 7^th | #

   @Tom - He does have a blog! Point your browser to - http://blog.iso50.com/

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