Design exploration: Red Bull Flight Lab

Here is something you can add to your "Things to do online when I should be doing homework" -list. Red Bull Flight Lab is basically an online game with a simple principle: build your own plane and fly it. Flight Lab was designed for Red Bull using Papervision3D (3D engine for Flash platform, don't ask me for details..) by an agency called Less Rain, and the site has won a number of awards, including the FWA Site of the Month. 

The first thing that caught my attention and made me stay on the site was the choice of music to go with the introductory video on the opening site; I liked the contrast between the classical piece and the insane looking pig they were building, as if there was something graceful in seeing it fly around. The overall design is simple and effective because it focuses on the main purpose of the site without distracting and cluttered advertising or an overwhelming amount of information jumping at you from every corner. 

It is in the "Build" section of the site where the experience truly begins and you start to get the hang of it. You are given a basic aircraft with separate parts for body and wings and you can redesign everything from the shape and color to the material of the aircraft. Changing the building material from, say, scrap metal to pizza box changes the whole background look of the site and includes a detail, such as a glass stain on the pizza box material. Underneath the building platform are rows of aircrafts designed by other users and clicking the paint brush reveals a long row of colors to choose from. As you scroll through other designs it dawns on you that you can pretty much build whatever you like, from a flying giraffe to your next door neighbor and this is where addiction begins. The navigation on the site is very simple and easy to use, although some items may be difficult to find at first due to their inconspicuous design. The whole building experience is complemented by appropriate sound effects, some of which come from navigation, some from touching different items on the screen, and some that are entirely independent "construction" sounds. 

I liked how instead of a boring scrollable paragraph explaining the game, the "Fly" section gives you a few clear tips on how to fly your aircraft, which you can choose to skip and perform an elegant crash into the water, like i did. The scene in which you fly is also very simple in design but achieves its goal because the fun part comes from the interaction of you trying to make your design fly. If you look closely you'll see that the scenery is made from the aircraft building materials, another nice detail. The "Hangar" section gives you information about the designed aircrafts and their pilots (designers) and you can look the the archives (in the upper right menu with login and register) and browse through designs worldwide or by country, and check out highest scores (in the same menu) by pilot or by aircraft. 

The overall design and structure stays consistent throughout the whole site, and even the pre-loader gives the visitor a taste of what's coming up by having a metallic look and a few screws with the Red Bull logo. The only part changing as you navigate through the menu is the middle part of the page, so the visitor is not taken away from the site in between sections and forced to look at a boring pre-loader. The sliding information bar on the bottom of the home page informs the visitor about upcoming Red Bull events and provides a connection between Red Bull's Flight Lab and a real life event, as if to say: "if you liked this lab, check out are events". Once you've played the game it is also tempting to go to Red Bull's actual website ( a link also on the bottom of the home page) to see what else they offer. Because the link is not at all forced on the visitor and doesn't draw unnecessary attention to itself, the incentive to go and look up information comes from the visitor, not the company, which is a nice change from the exhausting advertising of so many sites today. As it turns out, Red Bull has various other online games, but none of them offer such a comprehensive experience as the Flight Lab, which potentially draws new customers to the company without aggressive marketing. The Flight Lab is, at the least, a great way to kill time, even for people like me who have never tried their energy drink.