Design 004: South Florida Real Estate

It’s a bit late in the week, but luckily Design 004 is good enough to compensate. This design is for a fictional South Florida real estate firm, “Heart of Miami,” selling condos and homes in and around the beaches. I created the firm’s logo in Photoshop (since I don’t own a copy of Illustrator) by piecing together photos of skyscrapers, a neon sign in the shape of a heart, and Photoshop’s stroke, outer glow, and inner glow blending filters. I had originally intended to create the logo using Google SketchUp, but learning to use SketchUp was taking too much time. I’m definitely interested in that program, though, and I hope to add elements designed in SketchUp to a future design.

On to the technology. The main feature of this site is the combined vertical and horizontal scroll box featuring photos of each condo complex. This was achieved using the jQuery Tools library from FlowPlayer and its “scrollable” plugin. The vertical column on the left is a single scrollable which acts as the navigation for the “pages”, and each “page” is a horizontal scrollable. This setup could be expanded for additional properties by allowing the vertical scrollable to work in the same way as the horizontal scrollables – displaying four properties at a time, and having “next” and “previous” buttons to show additional properties. This site also uses Cufón to show headings and links in Futura. I am certainly interested in CSS3′s @font-face property, but I’m waiting for the dust to settle before embracing it wholeheartedly.

As always, you can interact with this new design on my separate portfolio site. I’m working on integrating the portfolio site into the current site’s “Portfolio” page. Be sure to check out the keyboard navigation – up/down to change pages, and left/right to change photos.

Well, we’re 21 days into January and I have four designs to show for it. I think the year is off to a great start, and I look forward to bringing you more designs as I finish them.