Desk Crit: Fred Zimmerman

Project Name: Alternative Energy
Creator: Fred Zimmerman

It's a good start. I understand that the project is early.

Right now, the flags are activated by rollover. The text that pops up is huge and it stays there in a separate window afterwards. It would be great if it showed a small preview text that could then be clicked to bring up more information. The pages shouldn't overwhelm the map.

There's an awful lot of content, so make sure your scope is fairly narrow. Take care of the bulk of the project and then start to expand to the accoutrements! I like the animation of the graph, and a few more of those would be nice, but don't get too bogged down on them without finishing the map and the basic page.

It's a little hard to read the United States tag. You could consider changing the colors or adding a border around the text. Perhaps you could use a box with alpha transparency underneath to set that area apart. It's important to keep colors consistent in web applications, so that the user knows what each element does every time.

It needs some sort of introductory or explanatory page or text, of course, but it is early, like we've discussed. I like the Flash movie at the beginning.