Terence Huynh

Reinventing the Apple Store Homepage

terencehuynh — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:05:19 +0000

The Apple Store has felt like a copy-paste job of the iTunes Store. Not to discredit it, but it is now getting old and I thought it needed some sort of reinvention. The mock-up follows the simplicity of shades used by Apple, and removes most of the clutter. It is a more cleaner, simplified and easy-to-understand Apple Store.

The homepage is divided into three sections – iOS + iPod, Mac, and Accessories. The top two highlight the products that you can buy from the store, and I’ve made it bigger in order to make it visible in both tablet and desktop screens. On the left-most hand side (below the title) reveal the links to buy accessories and software. Accessories get more attention ‘below the fold’ with a more tabbed structure – broken up to iPad, iPod, iPhone and Mac. The section is further subdivided into categories, the picks from ‘staff’ and the top selling accessories.

Also, for some reason in the Australian Apple Online Store, we don’t see a link to the retail stores. So, that’s given a small link at the top.

You can view the mock below.

ABC iView

terencehuynh — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 09:25:35 +0000

For a portfolio piece, I designed this mock up of what I think the ABC’s iView service should be. This mockup envisions that the site should be in HTML with a Flash player – similar to what every other site does, and the BBC’s iPlayer service (rather than enclosed in one Flash Player).

I’ve used a two-tiered navigation – able to find shows by channel or genre, with options for settings. There is also a slider at the top, which gives you the ‘editor’s choice’ of three shows available on iView; then followed by the ‘recently added’ and ‘last chance to see’ episodes. I’ve also included a schedule of ‘Yesterday’ and the days before – allowing users to find a show quickly.

Each video page will also have an episode summary and credits – again, inspired by the BBC’s iPlayer. On the right is where you can view all the episodes of the series. I see the ABC allowing all shows its produces to have the episodes up for a while, rather than the standard 14 days. And hopefully, we could see Q&A episodes last longer on iView – that would make me really happy.

You can see the two mockups below.

TECHGEEK.com.au Redesign

terencehuynh — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 07:17:15 +0000

TECHGEEK.com.au – a technology blog based in Australia, and which I also own – introduced dubbed “Lights 2″. The new design is HTML5 and CSS3 coded, and was developed with flexibility in mind. This meant that each component was seen to be a block which can be coded in or out whenever necessary. This was evident during the site’s CES coverage, where the live video feed replaced the top featured posts on the home page. Before, a simple redirect to an actual page was necessary.

The design’s flexibility can also be found in the site’s individual sections. TECHGEEK.com.au’s sections include Gadgetlyst, Pwnage and Cupertino Loop – all three integral to the brand with their own separate designs. This design saw each brand utilising the core template but all had their own slight changes in colour – and on what is presented.

Lights 2 also introduced a brand new policy, as I have stated in the introductory post to the design.

TECHGEEK.com.au will only be supporting the latest and the first-previous versions of all major browsers. This means, for Internet Explorer users, we’re stopping support for IE7 and IE6. All users should upgrade to the next version of their browser, because our site will now break any other browser outside what we have mentioned. I understand it may be a pain for some, but because HTML5 is supported in the latest browsers, we’ve had to make this decision.

The design is part of a new series of changes before TECHGEEK.com.au reaches its fifth birthday.

AlfaHosts Redesign

terencehuynh — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:56:03 +0000

With a brand new logo, AlfaHosts had to get a matching design. Working with CEO Stewart Wilson, I designed and coded a brand new design that would break the fundamental design principles and limitations that were established by the previous branding. The new design saw a common block pattern with different accents of blue to contrast with the dark blue background.

The design incorporates the new CSS3 “font-embed” feature, which means that any custom font can be used even if it is not installed on the user’s computer. This allowed the brand’s typeface – Banda Regular – to be used on all headings and navigation, giving some sort of brand unity.