Week Eight: Mashup Culture vs. Copyright Law
The idea of current trends in copyright infringement are interesting. One side of the party is saying don’t touch our stuff, and the other (Warhol, Banksy) are basing a large amount of their success on stealing images from someone, and slightly altering them. Then the creative commons is sitting right in the middle trying to make both sides get along. I think the CC is on to something with the altering of copyright labels, share and share alike as it were. However, until big business decides to jump on board the war will rage on. As for my practices, I can admit to being rather selfish. If I make something, I want it to stay mine (unless sold, by me) and I don’t want anyone else editing, manipulating, or publishing in any way that I have not approved of. So I guess that puts me on the side of big business, but the CC does have its draws. I may have to bend my current practices a little in the direction of CC to help the artistic community, and also reap its benefits.
Week Seven: Video
Video on the web is a relatively new frontier. With sites that not only allow posting of video, but allow live streaming of video, the computer is becoming more and more like a television, or a movie rental outlet. You can find most tv shows on hulu, or youtube, and a large selection of films directly from netflix, even news and weather can be found. There is no longer the need to pay the insane monthly cable bills. Long live streaming web, embedded quick times and h.264 encoding.
Week 6: The Portfolio Site
Portfolio websites come in many different shapes and sizes, from the bare bones html site, to the flashtastic all in one media experience, and every blog site in between. The importance of having a site, is simply getting your work out to the public, or at the very least potential employers. So when deciding on how to build a site, it is important to consider who you want to see it. If you want a huge audience that is easily accesable, maybe a blog site is the best bet. If you are looking to the mobile crowd, html would be the most versatile. But if you are trying to focus on the media industry, having everything on a simple to navigate page, with a bit more flare, Flash is the way to go. As for myself, I enjoy the ease of flash, but the mobile crowd is a huge draw. So having both options, a mobile site, and a flash site, seems like the way to go.
My computer is not letting me copy past or type in a slash, so no links this time kids.
Week Five: “Flaeshthetics”: How One Application Changed The Way We Think of Websites
Coming into this class, flash was my only background in web design. It is still my favorite web design application. I can see the draw of CSS, I understand the compatibility of HTML; but when it comes down to ease of use, and quality of output, flash is for me, tops. There are drawbacks to using flash, on the designer side, it opens the door to so many possibilities that often sites are cluttered and “flashtastic”. Even on the technical side there are issues, mobile browsing on an iphone? not on a flash site your not. I don’t intend to say that flash is the have all end all for web design, but until something better comes out, it will stay a top contender. In terms of final output, flash to me, is a lot like photo shop. The best photo shop painting, looks traditional, and likewise, the best flash sites, do not look like flash. The medium should not dictate the end product, if flash is used as a tool, and not a standard, the possibilities are endless.
Week Four: The Web in Your Pocket: Mobile Browsing
Mobile browsing is a new thorn in the web designers side, we are at the point where mobile browsing is becoming a normal occurrence. The problem is mobile web browsers are not on the same level of computer web browsers. The lack of full plugin (flash) compatibility greatly limits your choices for web design. 101 cookbooks addressed this problem by having two separate websites. On a computer we see a three column layout overflowing with information, adds, and images. On an iphone we see a single column layout with sparse use of text and images. As an animation major who needs to display video in a creative manner, this is very troublesome. That is not to say I could not make a bare bones site using quick time movies, but it just does not have the same pizazz. At the current technological state, less is more for mobile browsing, and that is an issue that web designers will have to address. Be it keeping in mind the scaling issue, or creating a separate mobile site.
Week Three: Typography on the Web
While the importance of web typography should be painfully obvious to designers and viewers alike, it seems to go relatively un-noticed. When the general public discuses “a great website” the font choice is rarely if ever mentioned. It is almost as if we have been trained to no longer care what the words look like, so long as they are on top of coherent designs. This is a huge step backwards in the realm of computer aided design. Even if the font choice is thrown out the window for readability sake, the paragraph design should be a focus.
How big do I make it? - Homework 2
This turned into a much more difficult question then I had anticipated. First off, you need to think about your viewers screen resolution. According to information from w3counter.com 1024×768 is the most popular screen resolution. 1024×768 only accounts for 38.52% of visitors, that means 61.48% of visitors are using another resolution. Only 5.12% of visitors are using a smaller (800×600) resolution, the rest are from 1152×864 and up.
This is only taking computer monitors into consideration, there is also the problem of hand held devices. *most* cellphones have an ideal website dimension of 160×240 (higher end cellphones like the iphones blackberrys and palms tend to have an autoscale feature.)
My input on the whole ordeal is to focus on the width more then the height, most websites have a scroll bar, and most mice have a scroll wheel (for vertical) navigation. As for the width, there are still a lot of choices, but going with 1024 should allow access by the majority of viewers. If you go with a 1024 width, you can always center it, so those with larger screens will still get the full content, with some negative space on either side.
The other option would be a liquid layout, that changes per viewer.
Website Like and Dislike - Homework 1
My current favorite website is
http://www.buenothebear.com/
I am a big fan of the negative space along with the hand made look. The site was created in flash, and from the looks of it, so are all of the animations. It has a very easy to understand navigation, along with enough humor to keep me entertained throught the sites viewing. There are some improvements to the site that I would recommend, the addition of a volume controle being one. Another would be an update, the site has not been touched since cartoon network purchased his animation.
On the flip side, another animation driven website, is one of my least favorite.
http://www.tokyoplastic.com/menu.html
I think the site has a great aesthetic quality, with great animation. However, you have to navigate with alot of guesswork, and you get stuck in the animations. With the button animation playing through every time you click, you get a very slow viewer response. Another drawback is the lack of updates, the site has been almost completely the same for well over three years