This is possibly the craziest concept design I ever worked on, but not for the same reasons you're thinking.
The Heart of Europe (developed by Kleindienst) is a very exciting project in the UAE which comprises of a mix of resorts and villas spread across 6 islands in The World Islands in Dubai. All luxury, super expensive properties that have the ultimate goal of impressing its buyers and push the boundaries of what's possible in engineering.
But Kleindienst is a very conservative company at the core too. So proposing this type of design was a long shot and didn't get approved. But here I want to focus on the design and thinking behind it, because at the time I thought it was quite magical.
This website project required some technologies that were beyond the capabilities of my team and I. We would require to use CGI graphics coupled with HTML 5 knowledge and some other coding skills that I personally lacked at the moment. But imagining this concept was interesting and fun.
The main development is called The Heart of Europe and it's being built at The World Islands in Dubai, this is an archipelago build off the coast of Dubai that if seen from above has the shape of the world map.
So the idea for the website was to create a start animation that when you open the site, it would show you the Earth seen from the universe as it zooms in to the project and show a bird's eye view of all the islands.
Once you're in that view, you can move the pan around the view to see the surroundings of the islands, but also you can see all the properties from every angle. Think Flyover mode on Apple Maps. Floating blue circles will show you all the properties in the resort and when clicked on them, they will open another layer on the screen showing information about the property, photos, a link to download the brochure, a link to watch the video and a button to see the full specs about the development.
The page for a specific property opens in a separate window, showing all details and features about it. You can see images and videos, and also download the floor plans. You see, I wanted to tune down the drama from the welcoming page a notch on the properties landing pages. These pages are more functional and should be very straight forward. They should also be able to load fast because these are the landing pages that would be used in digital marketing and social media to promote each of the projects. So the content should really be concise, clean and without so much ornamentation.
This project wasn't approved and it never went live. Not so much for lack of creativity or even effectiveness. This website was designed for a quite old fashioned company that doesn't really believe in the effectiveness of digital media and modern technologies. So I think this design would have had a tremendous impact on the sales of those properties, and directing its development would have been the joy of my life, however this is another common case of the wrong client. So moving on...