Don't get me wrong, Steve Harrington does fantastic work, but the website used to showcase his work could use a little more (un)commonsense. It's interesting that the designer made the site look less Flash-like when he could have simply used XHTML / CSS / JavaScript and had a much more flexible end product. At least, you could link to individual prints (and have a solid content management system). On a more positive note, I really dig the transitions between photos.
You're right. It's very counter-productive to make a flash site only for transition effects. Everything else on the site resembles html elements. There's no need to abuse usability conventions by tearing away functionality people expect to use.
Yeah, I can almost look past functional problems if the cool-factor is strong enough (see: Arcade Fire) but in this case it's just a limitation of the medium that can be dealt with fairly easily.
I want to be careful not to sound like I'm just ripping on this design company---I'm sure I've done things that could be done 100 times better---However, if they do a yearly assessment of their client sites, I'd love to give some consulting.
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I like his work a lot. I also like the look of the site but you are right, navigation is all but dead on the site.
What concerns me (and this is a good example of) is that between the AJAX fad and Flash more and more sites are killing both the back button and permalinks (for lack of a better term).
That drives me crazy. But of course, if we ever launch one site we've been working on people will be saying the same thing about us.