Ugh, these are horrible from a user interface standpoint. Sure they look great (and are an interesting experiment) but how will the average person use them? Does the use of these fancy flash pages create value for your website? Only if it's a particularly creative website e.g. bands.

I love all the sites on this post. There is a diffrence between websites built for art and websites built for commmerce. There is no reason these sites need to be indexed well or valid CSS, they are not trying to monetize the user, or get top placement in google. Most are just experiments in new ways to visualize and display information. As flash and other methods become more advanced we will be able to use more navigation techniques like these while giving up less as far as SEO. New ideas like this help us rethink how people interact with the internet and ultimatley lead to innovation. Art is about breaking the rules. These sites are art.

Debate useless without actual numbers.

What kind of numbers would you be refering too?

Conversion rates, user loyalty, whatever is relevant to the purpose ultimate purpose of the site.

I don't think they're all horrible, though in some cases their usability drawbacks are probably recognized and ignored because of who the customers are. Take the origami page, for example. That is remarkably clean and easy to understand. Using the page is a little cumbersome: pages load slowly and the text isn't all that easy to read, but everything looks very impressive, expensive, and fashionable. Looking impressive, expensive, and fashionable is probably worth more than getting straight to the point.

I hated the origami page. I couldn't figure out what the company did (the whole purpose of the website) for a while while I was awaiting for the about us page to load. And this was on my work's connection. Also I never did figure out how far I had to pull those things and it would take me a few times. I agree, the text was hard to read on some pages.

There are domains where look impressing, expensive and fashionable is reasonable, such as a design studio, band or something like that. Anyway, all that said, I though these sights were beautiful works of art. Just not terribly practical.

First read stuff by Tufte and Tognazzini and Cooper first.

Learn Flash second

there someting in arcitecture called form vs.funtion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function I live by this in interface design. First decide what funtion needs to happen, then decide on the best visual representation or form to achieve this. Basically this means the technology should not dictate what the interface or idea is. If you come up with a great idea, then you can explore what technology you need to execute it at the highest level, be it Flash, or another method.