Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
www.som.com

Founded in 1936, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is one of the world's leading architecture, urban design, engineering, and interior architecture firms.  In conjunction with Tanagram, we created a website to showcase SOM's extensive portfolio.  The site content was completely designed in Flash.  On the other hand, the Content Manager and much of the advanced logic powering the website was written in ColdFusion.  We integrated the two technologies to obtain the design advantages of Flash without sacrificing the dynamic functionality of ColdFusion.

Various types of content can be featured on the website.  Buildings and other projects are detailed on the site and are sorted into one or more categories.  Photographs of each project are displayed in a slide show format.  Awards earned by a project can be easily viewed via a pop-up window.  Press releases and news articles in which SOM is mentioned are available online.  Fun Facts, one-line bits of trivia, can be attached to projects, news listings or the home page itself.  To allow SOM to manage all this information in-house, we developed a customized administration area in which content can be entered, updated and approved for posting.

By far, the most distinctive part of the SOM website is the navigation.  Content is visually arranged in clusters, with items arranged in a ring around their parent item.  To navigate, users move the mouse cursor to an item of interest, causing the screen to zoom in on that item.  While the entire site is unified by this design, additional ways to navigate are provided for specific situations.  For example, when viewing a particular project, links are provided to navigate forward and backward within the project's category.  News articles are listed in an order selected by the user.  A site-wide search allows the different types of content to be queried in one place.  Finally, an innovative slide show feature automatically begins after a few minutes of inactivity, just as a screen saver would.  The slide show selects and displays site content at random, allowing users to view SOM's portfolio without doing anything at all.