InterVideo

"WinDVD"

InterVideo challenges most designers by mirroring the car stereo aesthetic that makes them look like it belongs in an automobile dashboard. This bias has been a strength and weakness. It plays to many people's expectations of what a CD/DVD player looks like and makes it easy for manufacturers like Dell and Gateway to put them in every PC. The problem is where ease-of-use collides with feature-excess. The problem with most Asian electronic design is dense control panels with little more than a nod to user experience feedback.
Here's the WinDVD4 that was shipping...

Charter: make a new set of simplified faces for this popular OEM product that often overwhelms users with options.

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Taking a cue from popular watch designs from Fossil and Swatch, Form and Function reshuffled the elements to make the most-used elements stronger graphically and easier to manipulate.

In the end I found inspiration in retro needle-gauges and a penchant for circles and the exquisite gearworks of fine watches were on my mind as I remapped functions and redesigned their front end to a dramatically simpler, limited, and focused goals.

Shh! Here is the WinDVD4 in it's natural habitat ...

It was fun wandering around "backstage" with the engineers becoming familiar with just how they go about making their virtual clockwork mesh, the bitmapped resources to account for and various limitations their windowing system demanded.
We ended up animating all the components in an interactive Director movie to simulate the artwork and logic was all there.

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After our work was handed off we never saw whether or not the art was put to good use, but somehow doubt it made headway in that frenetic organization. They've since been bought up by Corel Corporation and are several revisions {#8} of this software now. It is worth pointing out their crisp, high-tech, high-gloss/high-touch minimalist glassy click-wheel style currently in vogue there now. We see this sparse layout a genuflection to the strength of the Apple iPod interface than anything Form and Function did for them there.
But we share the POV just the same and think we were on to something.