Christiane Beaulieu
October 2nd, 2008
Just a simple but charming interface detail today:
In Christiane Beaulieu’s portfolio of photo retouching, the intro page hides a delightful feature: when hovering over the text, the magenta horizontal rule moves down, revealing the language choices of the website. The artist’s initials tween to form an emoticon, and if you pay some attention, you’ll see the B blinks at you.
Very simple and not exactly useful, but this kind of surprising and fun detail can make the user much friendlier towards the interface she is using. Specially considering this is the first screen of the website. Congratulations to Philippe Roy, createor this nifty website.
Inside, the way the state between original and retouched photos is changed is also worth noticing. The complete focus on Beaulieu’s work is praiseworthy. The URL (cbeau.ca) is also a nice play on words as it can be read as c’est beau, which means it’s beautiful, in French.
On a different matter, I find it quite disturbing how much retouching advertising pictures undergo. As naive as it may sound, it always surprises how far from reality models and even products are when depicted in these situations.