BreakingPoint Homepage

I was recently hired by BreakingPoint Systems to do some Flash work for their website. I went in for a brief by their marketing team and we did some drawing on the whiteboard, touching on their requirements and expectations for the project. They were somewhat on the fence regarding the direction they wanted to go, both aesthetically and functionally, but as I produced the first conceptual images, things started to take shape.


Fast and intuitive; this was our aim for the initial concept. BreakingPoint specializes in managing enormous amounts of testing and connection data at very high speeds, so while the finished product had to be fast at runtime, it also had to look fast. It needed to convey a sense of speed, visually. This line of thinking led to a "removable", animated panel for shuffling key information in a hurry. This would keep the interface as straight-forward, elegant, and "2.0" as possible, while refreshing the focus of the homepage and preventing redundancy.

Or so I thought. They liked the functionality, but ultimately it was not intuitive enough for their needs. For the second pass, I would go with a more traditional approach.


They were highly enthusiastic about this design, and while it would see a few changes along the way, they wanted to move forward immediately. A video team came in to do the five proposed content segments that would play on each button press, while I worked on the application that would eventually tie it all together.

We hit a lull midway through the production process as different trade shows began to kick off and various technical issues on the video end began to rear their ugly heads, but we managed to work through it and meet our deadlines without any notable complications. They are thrilled with the final product, and I have since become one of BreakingPoint's go-to freelancers.

Check out the project here.