I really love the content, the photos are beautiful, but the presentation is terrible. It seems that most like the format, but I don't see it as an efficient way of presenting the content.
Honestly I would prefer to just wait while all the content loads initially. The scrolling really doesn't work otherwise, I initially scrolled by a couple of images because I didn't think there was suppose to be images or videos to all the images.
Most of the compromises in the design comes from accommodating video. I originally preloaded almost everything, but found that even two videos in the DOM bogs down the browser and makes scrolling laggy.
Anyways, I'm still working on it so feedback is welcome. My current thought is to do away with the fading and serve up placeholder images for the videos until they load.
I'm in Europe, so the whole experience scrolling down was of a stutter kind.
Please add a loading indicator of some kind - both for images and for video. When I was scrolling down, most of the time there was at least a 2-3 second delay before an image would appear, and longer for videos. For a couple of video I lost my patience after half a minute and just kept on scrolling. In several cases it wasn't clear if a text blurb on a black background was an intentional break in the narration or if it was just a delay in background loading.
Also, please make a single down arrow keypress do a full page scroll and align the frame to the top of the screen.
The website looks broken on my vertical monitors because of the way you are fading content in and out: http://i.imgur.com/LmzaezF.png
As I scroll down, the browser chooses a random div near the top to show content, and the others fade out. It's very frustrating and not what you intended for me to experience, so I wanted to point it out.
In terms of performance, perhaps you could: i) use domain sharding for pre-loading all the images. ii) Keep the current system for loading and removing videos, but create a placeholder image for each video that's a capture of the first frame of the video. This might make scrolling past videos a little easier.
Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the site as-is. Thanks for sharing it with us.
The photos look fascinating, but the UX was was just too frustrating for me to continue with on my kinda-shitty comcast internet.
(Also if you don't load all the images at first, at least load like always the next 5 or something. Also I'd recommend making sure to test on crappy internet, or with a network link conditioner.)
This is really beautiful. I absolutely enjoyed reading this, brings back fond memories of National Geographics when I was a kid.
I actually enjoyed how the photos don't load until the frame is entirely in view, it kind of made me hold my breath excitedly for the next gorgeous photo to fade in.
Honestly I would prefer to just wait while all the content loads initially. The scrolling really doesn't work otherwise, I initially scrolled by a couple of images because I didn't think there was suppose to be images or videos to all the images.
Lovely content, gimmicky presentation.