The Watchmen movie website opens with a strong design choice- drops of blood in a flash animation onto a yellow background, a moving replica of the comic book cover. This splash page waits for the trailer of the movie to load, but thankfully allows you to skip past the trailer once it has loaded onto the page. Once on the page you are faced with two navigation systems; there is one bar along the bottom of the flash animated background of the characters, and the user chooses a character name. The user can also click a pocket watch that opens, cogs spilling out around a navigation that points you to categories, like downloads, or "about," that don't sort based on character. If you click on the character, the watch navigation disappears, and the character's name is highlighted. There is also a rollover on the text. You know where you are in the site based on the selected state. Once you have entered a character section, the way you get back to the home page is by x-ing out with a close button. While it's not completely obvious, it does mean that there is always a way for the user to get back home. The architecture of the page is not very deep at all, however, as the main purpose, promoting the movie "the watchmen" is pretty easily achieved in very few levels of architecture. The architecture is not completely flat (you can't get to the navigation in the pocket watch from the character profiles), but it takes pretty few steps to get from one place to the other.
There isn't much typography on the page, so in terms of hierarchy, it doesn't take much to indicate what is a header and what is a subheader. The changes are based in size and color, but you really only see it in the pocket watch navigation or as headers for icons.
The constant on the page is a yellow bar that says "The Watchmen" that has a countdown to the movie release. On the character pages, that stays below the main content, but on pages that you access via pocketwatch, the bar shifts above the content. The pages change base on what is selected though- each character has their own background, and the environment shifts and fades into it. The focal point is the feel of the movie, which is what all of the imagery tries to capture. There are really no icons used anywhere, just photos. The colors are pretty much dark, with a neat noir lighting. The images and colors were definitely chosen to recreate the feel of the comic book. The yellow is pretty much always used for navigation, and the placement mimics the yellow bar on the cover of the graphic novel. You can't search for anything, but you don't really need to. Everything is pretty clearly laid out and clean, and the images definitely recreate the environment of the movie. There is, however, nothing terribly useful about the site. You can get promotional downloads and you can watch the trailer. You can read about almost all of the characters (they've been adding characters slowly, and only the link for the Silk Spectre is still not working), you can read about the movie, and that's pretty much all it seeks to do.