Client: Atria Books
The Map of Time website was an exciting project for me. Designed and built at the beginning of 2011 I was eager to do a parallax motif on a site. I was contacted by Atria Books to design a website for a foreign author new to the American market, Felix J. Palma. His book The Map of Time is a fantastic trip through a haunting Victorian London with time travel, Jack the Ripper, and three unique storylines.
My goal with this site was to break the mold of the convential author book site. I still needed to have the necessities like where to buy the book, PR, downloads, etc. But there was no reason why they all had to be separate pages in a boring site. I pitched the idea of this single-page experience and the client loved it.
The book involves an actually map of time that is essentially a string with many other strings coming off of it. I used that imagery to inspire the design that allowed the user to scroll down through the site (down through the story) and get introduced to characters and plot points as they travelled along the string.
The site uses a parallax motif as the user scrolled shifting the different srings which created a sense of depth. In addition, I used found art, stock photographery and digital illustration to bring the characters and plot points that live along the map of time to life.
The site also integrated a twitter feed from the Time Mapper himself. USers could get a glimpse into what the Time Mapper was up to. It also served as a PR channel for the book. The site incpororated custom webfonts including the Victorian brush and hand written font for the Time Mapper's tweets.
