Our website mascot will most likely be a anime-style robot with very geometric features; these features will expand outwards and serve as the general aesthetic for the site's design and layout: lines, curves, squares, etc. Additionally, we plan to create an anti-bluemountain.com of sorts, featuring sleek, flash-animated e-cards for people who are interested in things other than poorly animated cartoons and midi files that play happy birthday. Using flash, our e-cards will incorporate the customized text within the actual card as part of the animation, as opposed to the traditional style of using html tags to place the text above or below the animation. We will feature an array of music that will be inspired from the site's futuristic design: think drum n bass, trip hop, asian dub, etc... The greetings themselves will be less traditional, and will offer categories including 'tell someone you hate them', 'im dumping you,' and 'stop emailing me or ill have you arrested for harassment'. These cards will be stored in a database that can be accessed via a unique password that will be sent to the recipient.
Users will also have the option of listening to music while the cruise the site.
Our group plans to create a user-interactive website that revolves centrally around an as-yet-unnamed character. This character will most likely be some sort of cutesy, animated, and friendly creature that will assist the user with all of the available functions that the website features. We feel that creating this 'character' will fucntion not only as user-entertainment, but also as a way of adding a sense of unity to all of the website's different features. Additionally, the presence of some sort of character will probably imprint itself on the user, thus enhancing the user's recognition and memory of the site, thereby distinguishing it from the rest.
At this early stage, the main focus seems to be towards creating a series of flash animated e-greeting cards; thus, the creature will act as the 'mailman' that delivers the goods. Some other features that seemed to pique the group's interests included some sort of sound/music feature, where the user is allowed to play different genres of songs as he/she is searching the site, as well as the ability to create his/her own music; in this sense, our creature will function as the website DJ. We would also like to include a section where the user can receive some sort of background information about our cute little creature, which will most likely consist of some sort of entertaining flash-animated movie sequence.
Considering the fact that this idea is still in its embryonic stage, the features and functions of this site will most likely develop significantly over the course of time. Although I am unsure of the opinions of my other group members at this point, I know that *I* personally would like to incorporate a more user-interactive feel to the site, thereby creating a more useful website and something less reliant on mere entertainment. Any suggestions to this matter would be greatly appreciated. Within our group, we have a sound expert, a photoshop/illustrator/quark expert, and an html expert. Although the site will revolve around the aformentioned 'cute' character, the site itself will most likely have a much more aesthetically sophisticated feel to it. We will be using Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver (and Pagemill), and various sound-editing software (i.e. Acid Sound) to create this site. Additionally, some back-end java will obviously be used to fine-tune the site to meet our needs, etc etc.