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By Drupology on
Wave House asked Drupology to develop a Drupal website that broke the conventions of typical website design. The primary focus was visual, with the text content hidden until the visitor wanted to read it. This frees up all the screen real estate for photography. The other important design consideration was transition.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Wave House is a complete entertainment, food and beverage, live music and retail complex which exports the tropical, California beach and board sport lifestyle to anywhere in the world.
Drupoloy have a strong background in developing heavily-customised Drupal websites. Completed projects include The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, Mazda, and all of Wave House's global sites.
Wave House have been using Drupal to promote all their venues since 2009. Drupal offers so much flexibility and functionality so it is the perfect choice.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The primary focus, as mentioned, was visual. We took the full-screen approach allowing photography to be the main focus. The content and navigation areas were secondary and therefore use very little real estate until the visitor wants to read or interact with these areas.
The transitions were very important and we used some existing Drupal modules as well as some custom written modules to take advantage of jQuery's customisations. Accordion modules, horizontal tabs, content sliders, and fading backgrounds are all used heavily throughout the site.
Another key area is the image and video gallery. We love the jQuery Isotope / Masonry effect with Views on the gallery page. Some template customisation was required to make the images render in different sizes and the excellent Media module (and its dependencies) allows for fields on images.
The theme itself is derived from Omega's flexible layout. Everything is defined in percentages and ems which makes the images, positioning, and font sizes scalable. Again, this breaks free from the typical design mould and works really well.
Putting all this together took a lot of time but the finished site has received some very good feedback. We think we've broken out of the mould of typical website design and created something very different that, thanks to the photography, is visually stunning.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Media allows for easy adding of third-party content.
Views and Isotope make a fantastic gallery.
Omega is a great starting point for a flexible theme.
Accordion Menu and Horizontal Tabs make for good navigation.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Wave House
Design by Association
Sectors:
Entertainment
Music
Retail and Distribution
Sports
Travel and Hospitality
