I was just wasting time trying to avoid doing my Digital Media assignment and decided to look around the web. One site which I regularly check is Verlee’s Blog. She blogs about graphic & web design and writes some good tutorials. I followed a link to her design company Duoh. I like the general look of the website as I like the work Verlee does, but I couln’t help being annoyed about images which are quotes about design and are placed halfway outside the screen & there is no scrollbar for me to see what they are. I initially thought this was a problem with Firefox but the same issue arises with Internet Explorer. I had to zoom out the browser to 75% to see the full page. My laptop screen is 1280×800 which should be wide enough for most websites.
This is how it appears on my screen. What is that quote?????
This is it at 75%. IE messes up some of the image locations
What? To hell with bad browsers? Well I can’t get the website to display properly in any browser (I tried it in Google Chrome & Apple Safari also) but I’m more inclined to believe the problem is with the design of the website.
It seems to me that in designing the site they had too may ideas of what they wanted to do & not enough space to fit it all in. I do like the look of the site, don’t get me wrong, if only they would remove the quotes (or at leat make them visible to people who don’t have 24 inch screens)
I know from the design of my own site that the design has to be narrowed down. I had so many ideas I wanted to use but I had to pick a few key ones to work out the overall look of the site.
Sol Sender talks about the different designs considered for the Obama presidential campaign & how the final design could be adapted to various uses. It’s an interesting insight into the thought processes in designing logos
Andrew Keen in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ puts forward a strong argument against the increasing amount of unedited user generated content on the web & the blurring of the divisions between creator & audience. While I found myself in some way agreeing with Mr. Keen about the inanity of the tens of thousands of blogs & youtube videos, I don’t agree that this has a destructive impact on our culture, economy & values.
Personally, I have been using the internet for about 10 years now & always saw it as an information tool. I never had interest in the social aspects of the internet until recently but since joining Facebook & starting my own blog, it has exposed me to a new dimension of the internet & I find it strangely therapeutic. I feel that in this day & age expressing yourself can be difficult for some, and this can lead to many problems. The internet gives a level of anonymity & gives people confidence to get their views & ideas across. From this point of view I think blogging & forums empower people to connect to others with similar interests & views.
Yes, this can be abused, but to use the analogy used in the book, is it not worth enduring the multitude of blogs & videos which are standard or sub-standard for a few shakespearean masterpieces? The people who create these masterpieces may not be trained as journalists or entertainers but who is to say they need to be. Some of the greatest writers & artists in history had no formal training & worked with their raw talent and honed their skills.
I do think there is a flaw in the system when people think they can trust the writings of a blog as fact without checking other sources. Also many people (myself included sometimes) implicitly trust the content in Wikipedia without checking elsewhere. This is a challenge for news & media companies to strengthen their reputation & profile among web users.
The internet & society are ever evolving & content producers need to evolve along with the needs of the consuming public to remain successful. The main reason, I feel, for the proliferation of pirated content on the web is due to the lack of innovation of the media creators. They need to listen to what people want and embrace the web & make it work for them.
A good example of embracing the internet is Barack Obama. His recent success in the US presidential elections was in no small part due to his strong web presence on sites like Youtube, Facebook, Myspace & Twitter. Also, to appeal to a new audience Weezer employed some of the most famous Youtube stars to star in the video for their recent single Pork & Beans.
In short, my view is that the internet has become a place where people can come together in a virtual sense & initiate or participate in discussion on a vast range of topics from politics to music & beyond. It is extremely empowering & geographical boundaries have in most cases become irrelevant. Quality always stands out from the rest & users vote with their mouse clicks as to what should be promoted. The internet needs quality media from news, music, television & film companies, but they equally need the internet for their long term survival.
To advertise the launch of the new Terminator Salvation movie, Sony Pictures have created an animated poster. It’s somewhere between being a poster & a trailer. Is this going to be a new movement in movie advertising? It makes me think of the moving adverts in the Minority Report movie. Scary stuff! Check out the poster here.
Firefox is great because it lets you add on extra plugin applications to enhance your experience of the internet. Internet Explorer 8 is also following this trend but is very limited at the moment.
My favourite add-on for Firefox is Cooliris Previews. It makes viewing images on the internet a much nicer experience. It works great for Flickr & Facebook Photoalbums & Google Images also. It also works on youtube videos & some blogs. It creates a 3d wall view of all the photos in an album allowing you to quickly scan through the photos to find the one you want or it makes a slideshow if so desired. It moves beyond the basic and very restrictive 10 thumbnails a page & makes image search a breeze.
It works on Firefox, Internet Explorer & Safari. Check it out, it’s great!
Hi all, hope you had a good week. Those of us in the Theories & Principles of Animation were given a stop motion animation to do for Friday. It has caused me some sleepless nights but at last I am almost finished the filming of it! I messed about a bit with some of the free movie making & stop motion programs, & my favourites are AnimatorDV Simple+ & Windows Movie Maker (It’s actually a pretty good program & easy to use).
Originally I thought AnimatorDV was great & I could change the FPS of the animation, but I had to output the animation to another program like Movie Maker to put sounds in. In the end I found Movie Maker to be ideal for what I wanted. I didn’t mind that it can only play 8 pictures a second because my animation ended up looking better that way (it was very rushed at 15fps) & I can insert sound effects at any part of the video.
A good website for free sound effects is Sound Snap.
In case anyone was thinking of using Movie Maker this is something which took me a while to figure out so hopefully it will help someone. Inserted pictures default to 5 second duration but it’s easy to change that to 8 frames per second (or a 0.125 second duration) (method shown below)
The video above gives some idea of how difficult it can be for blind people to use the internet. New accessibilty guidelines will soon be published by the W3C & the most exciting new function is Aria live regions. This allows web developers to accurately describe the role & state of DIV tags so that screen readers, used by blind users, can output the page information in a more understandable way.
Google have developed an open-source code called AxsJAX (Access enabling AJAX) which builds on ARIA live regions and uses JavaScript to add accessibility features to websites. They originally built it into Google Reader & GMail. They have made available a library of common accessibility functions to web developers. The code allows developers to easily inject accessibilty features into their existing sites without restructuring.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this blog for a while. It’s written by an English graphic designer called Chris Spooner. He disigns some really nice stuff & he puts up tutorials, free textures & good links to other sites.
He has written two tutorials on how to create a website first in Photoshop & then how to slice it up & reproduce it with html & css. I think the look of the page he designed is phenomenal & I’m definately going to give it a go.
