Mechanics of an Interactive Tour Bus
By Darleen Scherer
TVT Records, America's second largest independent record label, wanted to create a hip site that would grab customers' attention with entertaining and interactive visuals, and keep them at the site. After seeing our shop's Web site, which is based on changing themes designed using Adobe Photoshop 4.4 and Adobe Illustrator 8.0, TVT wanted a themed e-commerce site.
Our firm, Chopping Block, likes to add whimsy to its work. Socket, a team of programmers who share office space with us, built the back end.
After reviewing several ideas, TVT decided on a do-it-yourself theme in which visitors can personalize their site experience while they are navigating. The company further decided on a bus theme that would combine an Airstream trailer, a '50s hot rod, a custom van, and a touring van taking visitors on an excursion as they cruise for tunes (see
Figure 1).
All the site's graphics, most of which are animated to enhance the live bus-tour experience, are line art created using Adobe Illustrator. While Illustrator is sometimes relegated to tasks such as type treatments and logo design, we decided to use it as the main art tool because it's vector based and can be imported easily into Flash, which we used to create the interactivity.
We focused our attention away from first-time Internet users and toward the kind of user who searches out extremely interactive sites with rich content. TVT agreed to an illustration-heavy theme, and because it sells music, streaming audio was very important.
