In working on web design and DVD authoring, we're constantly focusing on making the user interface easy to understand and use. Every job is different, with different goals to meet and limitations to accommodate. When it comes to complexity of functionality, these two media represent opposite ends of the poles: Drupal-powered websites have much complexity, while DVDs are incredibly simple. Yet optimizing usability of these two vastly different interactive formats can be very challenging. This is because complexity in itself is not a barrier to ease of use. Complexity is not a disease.

Last week we completed some DVD menu design work for Riverbend Entertainment's upcoming release, "Made-Up" (starring Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams).

The main menu

The main menu was a motion menu. Because we had a beautiful video montage with which to work, this was perhaps the easiest part of the project. Our job here was simply to create the "buttons" and selector graphics.

Copyright 2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLP

Doing our work in Combustion, first we masked out an area with which to work -- the edges, and a lower-thirds area. Then we added a gaussian blur, a glow effect, a bit of desaturation, and played with the histogram a bit. We also added a touch of blur and glow to the overall image.

This way the text pops against the diffused background, while we still get a nice clear view of the action in the center of the frame.