Just checked out the new Lacoste Red site today, at the recommendation of John Drake. In theory, this is the kind of website that gives me nightmares. All flash, long intro before you actually get to the navigation of the site itself, loud music playing at you without warning–all the kind of stuff that I’ve considered a crime to do to a website for years.

But amazingly,  I actually really dig this site. I get what it’s trying to do, and I think it’s pretty darn cool. It’s playing with the way you’re accustomed to a website behaving; reimagining the typical experience you’ve come to expect in your browser:

Part website, part music video, part special effects sequence, part fashion editorial, part video game, it definitely doesn’t feel like a standard website experience. I think in so much of “interactive” development we have become stuck in this mobius loop where we continue to create website experiences that conform to what website experiences are expected to conform to. The internet is full of this kind of boring but navigable (blogs) or pretty but useless (flash) tract housing. Which is why there’s really something to be said for experience design that can reimagine the way we expect to navigate the  inside of a browser window, and create new and  unexpected yet effective and compelling experiences there. Hope we may start to see more of it.