Building a new website

For a client I am building a new website, because her website is a total disaster. From design view but also from commercial attractivness. Because her shop is in the erotic business of fetish clothes and lingerie I was looking for a special touch. Representing the boudoir like feeling but also the edgy atmosphere of a dungeon. Here is the first look into the project. I started by replacing her home screen with this flash intro. At least so people know something is going to change soon.

I started by designing the different parts in Adobe Illustrator and importing them into Carrara Pro 3D. From there the meshes were worked into 3D parts. Text was added as well as different  textures like the wallpaper in the back. The wallpaper I found on the internet and I had to rework it into a texture with photoshop. Then lights were added and the virtual camera movement. The rendering took about 1 hour in good quality. I rendered the 3D images as sequenced tiff files without compression. After this I used photoshop and Adobe Bridge to batch the sequences into jpeg's with progressive quality, after this the sequences were seperated into 2, one for the first clip and the second for the mouseover interaction. Then these sequences were imported into Flash. From there I had to programm the timeline as well the old movie scratches and dust. This is done with the help of some scripting to get the random effect of movie flickr and dust spots. At some point I wanted some small 3D interaction and I created the mouseover. Therefore I had made a second sequence. The problem was to keep the size of the flash down. I did this with the help of photoshop, by using a progressive compressing method. It's close enough for good quality. I ended up with 40% smaller file size. The original can be found here. To give you an idea about the work that get into this, It took me about 2 full days to build this intro.

The biggest problem for me was the overall design. The name of the shop is Catchu - 2bkinky. Making a logo for this name is not quite simple. It's to much information to make a simple design. I started with the character U shape and I thought of a shield. Then I came up with the idea to put it together as some sort of Blacon or family weapon. The owner of the shop was questioning the readibility, because she didn't see the letter U at the beginning. So I moved it more forward on the shield to make it more visible. What do you think is it a good design? Here you see the old design, that in my opinion is far from a design, it's created with the Word Art feature in Microsoft Word