Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
Coming soon
I’m in the process of starting a small Web design company. It’s called NightBird Studios, and we’ll be lauching our Web site in early 2010. It’s been a long process, and I probably should not have attempted to work on it while school is still in session, mainly because designing Web sites, programming both front- and back-end applications and making business plans is a heck of a lot more fun (and seems more meaningful) than doing schoolwork. So now I have three big projects, three papers and two videos to start and finish in the next two weeks. Oops.
Anyway, designing the front-end of the NightBird site has been really fun. It’s gone through three redesigns, and the one we finally picked looks like this:
NightBird Studios: Coming January 2010
It has a cool fixed-position header with a gradient fade below, so when the user scrolls through the page, all the content fades to black. It’s a really simple, subtle effect, but I think it’s classy. Ha. Now we’re working on creating a space for our clients to easily ask us questions, look up FAQs and download different applications for their own sites. It’s coming along nicely, and should be functioning in time for our January deadline.
I know I usually have some sort of design advice in these posts, but I don’t really have anything to add to this one – except that you should dive into projects when you don’t already have six classes worth of things to do.
Live and learn!
PSA
Update your browsers. Right now. Especially if you’re still using IE6.
Thank you.
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On a similar note, according to w3schools, use of Internet Explorer 6 is down to less than 10.6 percent of all browser users, as of October.
If only that were a negligible amount.
It will be very nice when we Web designers will never have to worry about IE6 ever again. I was working on a site last week that had a fixed-positioned header and another absolute-positioned div on the right side of the page. It took me less than 4 hours to design and build the site. And then it took me another six days to figure out how to get it to look decent for IE6.
Part of the problem was my inability to find a computer that was still running it. Even the computers at work (which, by the way, still use Microsoft Word ’97) had upgraded to IE7.
Luckily, as I was talking to a friend about my troubles, she showed me Adobe’s BrowserLab. You have to sign into your Adobe account, but then you can upload different URLs and BrowserLab will load and display them in a simulator with all the different browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari, Firefox for PC, Firefox for Mac, Opera, Chrome… It was a great find, and it made it so much easier to test my sites in older browsers.
Werewolves
It’s time for some color analysis. I’m not going to chat about color theory (you can learn that here) or different palettes or patterns (if you’d like some of those, check out this spiffy blog) — I’d just like to offer another perspective on how color plays a part in perception and how that’s always applicable to design.
We all know that people infer different meanings and emotions from different colors. Red = angry/stop/love, blue = calm/sad/water, green = money/go/natural, yellow = happy/caution/cowardice, black = evil/death/classic, and so forth. Because of this, it becomes very important how you use colors in your artistic or professional creations.
For example, you may notice that places like Panera and Starbucks color their walls and promotional materials in warm shades of yellow and orange, often accompanied by a muted shade of green. They make customers feel cozy and comfortable and hungry. Places like schools and hospitals are often white or a light tan to look clean and to keep people focused. Other places like artsy bars or music venues can paint their walls black to appear upscale or sophisticated.
On the contrary, improper use of color can give people the wrong message. You wouldn’t want to paint your hospital blood red or black, which would imply sickness and death. You probably wouldn’t want to paint your law office lime green and pink because no one would take you seriously as a lawyer since your office would wind up looking like a day care.
The same concepts apply to your Web site. Bright colors improperly used will look childish, and on a light-colored background they will be hard to read. Very dark colors are hard to use on Web sites because cheap monitors have a hard time displaying them, so any different values will look much darker than you, as designer, initially envisioned. Take this very blog, for example — it looks lovely on my Mac, but when I look at it on other computers, I sometimes have a really hard time reading the text. Be expecting a new theme sometime soon. Part of the reason Facebook outlived MySpace is because it looks cleaner and more professional. MySpace signed its own death certificate by allowing users to redesign their own pages, bringing in all sorts of misused colors and images and flaming logos and animated gifs. Ew. For Web sites, it’s probably best just to stick with a white background, dark text (shades of grey are great), and an accent color or two that fit your image — your site will be clean easy to read. Dark backgrounds are a good way to go for things like galleries or portfolios so your work is what stands out as the most striking thing on the page.
One group that has really mastered their use of color is the movie industry. Movie producers know what they’re doing when it comes to color. Directors like Guierrmo Del Toro sketch out full books of how they want to use colors in their films – different shades for different scenes, bright, over-saturated colors to show good memories, dark to show fear and suspense. Some shoot entire films with different filters to make their movies look moodier. For example, the “Underworld” films have a blue filter applied to almost every scene, which makes the film seem darker and more dramatic. Some may think this is cheesy, but it works. Other movies like “Man on Fire” is very yellow. All of Baz Lurhman’s big films like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge” are overly bright, giving the whole picture a very whimsical feel.
So please, think about colors before you use them, and make sure your product is readable. Thanks!
Flash is fun
I love Flash;
Flash is fun;
Silly animations are number one.
Thank goodness I’m not a poet. I would have a horrible, horrible life ahead of me. Anyway, what I meant to say was that I am absolutely having a blast with my Interactive Design class. The only problem is that I want to spend all my time working fun flash Web sites, but unfortunately I’m working two jobs right now and taking a grand total of 21 credit hours at school, so the time I can delegate to playing with Flash is dramatically less than ideal. Want to see what I’ve done so far? Here’s my site for a fictional restaurant. I have too much fun doing this stuff. Right now I’m working on a self-promotinal site, a product branding project and a “wow factor widget,” which is basically just whatever cool flash thing I want to create. I’m thinking about doing some sort of intricate trivia game or something – I don’t really know yet. I also have a really goofy animation that I might just post up here for fun when I get around to it.
So, with all these exciting Web-based design things, my CSC class and the super-cool possibilities for the online Creightonian, I’ve been considering taking on another major. And because I only have three journalism/graphic design classes left to take after the spring semester (History of Mass Communications, Feature Writing, 3D Graphics & Animation and History of Art — fine, four classes), I still have a good two years to add something else to my delightfully busy schedule. I’m guessing it’ll be another CSC minor, although I think it’s silly to have two minors in the computer science department and no major. But if I’m really only interested in computer graphics, Web-based and database stuff, I want to take those classes rather than the 18 additional hours of generic courses required for the major. Meh, we’ll see…
In the meantime, here are some nifty Flash sites that have been entertaining me for awhile:
http://www.wildridexm.com/ I enjoyed the preloader.
http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk/obtw/ I like Pink Floyd; I like the Web site.
http://www.saizenmedia.com/nightwish/ This is just cool.
Wow – two posts in one day! Crazy!
The basics are good to revisit sometimes . . .
Blog entry number 2 – here goes…
Today I’m going to chat about Web design again – because I think it’s really interesting and fun, and I like it a lot. I took Joel’s class over the summer, and after spending between four and eight hours every day for three weeks talking about design and building Web sites, I decided that it’s something I really enjoy doing. I also decided that maybe I would attempt to minor in Interactive Web Design, which requires taking the intro computer science class, “Computers and Scientific Thinking,” and later on, “Web Programming,” which I’m super-excited to learn about.
Anywho, I spent a couple hours yesterday (Thursday) playing with my CSC121 Web page. It’s another basic personal page, but that was the assignment (for at least the third time in the past few months – I’m starting to get tired of writing/reading about myself so much!). I think I went a little overboard for my first CSC assignment, but the practice was good for me. It was the first time since my freshman year of high school that I made a Web page only using HTML (the requirement for the assignment). It was actually very interesting, and I learned a lot from it. Instead of just using Dreamweaver, where I only need to know which buttons to push, I actually had to know what I was doing. I had to write the code instead of using a program to write it for me. After that experience, I feel much more knowledgeable and confident about designing Web sites. Knowing and using all the little details in basic HTML made it a lot easier to identify problems and know how to fix them. I didn’t even use a CSS file (although I wanted to but wasn’t allowed to do so for the assignment), but having to type out absolutely everything I wanted on my page was a great way to really get familiar with writing code and understanding how it works rather than just knowing that it does. I think that’s important, even if it’s unrealistic and inefficient to do on a regular basis.
Either way, I think my little Web page turned out kind of cute, and it got me excited about designing again. I’m excited to see what kinds of fun things the rest of my JMC/CSC classes have in store for me…
The good, the bad & the ugly
Hello, All – apparently you’ve stumbled upon this blog for my Intro to Mass Communication Technology class. I should probably introduce myself: I’m Julia, a journalism student at Creighton University. If you’d like to know more, visit my Web site. Here we go…
To start, I’ll chat about some Web sites I like a lot:
The Onion
Deviant Art
Facebook
I like these sites because they are well-designed and easy to navigate, and the design of each Web site fits the overall content, image and purpose of the site.
For example, The Onion is a spoofy news magazine, and the home page does a brilliant job copying the general taking-yourself-too-seriously feel of legit news sites like nytimes.com (an awesome site to talk about as well, but The Onion is hilarious and has more graphic elements on the Web site, which I like). All the different sections are easy to locate and links are easily identifiable as such. The only thing I don’t like about theonion.com is that there is isn’t much consistency throughout the site as a whole. Each section has a completely different design, but all the still content is readily available and the designs are user-friendly, which is good.
Deviant Art is a really cool site because of its interactivity and organization. I think it does a great job categorizing all the user-posted content, so whatever you want to look at is easy to find. It has a very thorough archive system, so even if you haven’t been on the site in a while, you don’t miss out on anything. When you set up an account with Deviant Art, it lets you upload your own photos, traditional art, designs – anything, basically – and then other users can look at your stuff and make comments and put them in their “favorites” folder. The site also has a very nice system for ordering prints, Deviant Art chats, a message board, news feeds, etc. The site is very user-friendly and customizable. I think it has a really cohesive and innovative design.
I like Facebook mainly for its networking capabilities, but also for its basic design. It looks nice. The colors are subdued but not dull, and everything is the right size and separated into boxes that aren’t overpowering or distracting. I think the old version looked a little better than than the newer one, as far as visual appeal and organization go, but the new Facebook is really a lot easier to use. Anything you want is in different tabs at the top of the page, which is nice because you don’t have to scroll as much as you did with the old version (I hate scrolling.). The pictures are also bigger in the new version, and the new version keeps the annoying extra applications out of the way. It also makes it easier to look through different photo albums without having to click through as many links as you used to, and the ads are less noticeable on the right side of the page than they were when they were on the left. It’s just a really well-designed site.
And now for some Web sites I don’t like:
In general, I hate sites with gross animated .gifs, distorted photos, colors that don’t work and text you can’t read. So, to maintain my sanity, I’ll talk about a couple successful sites that suit their purpose but could look a lot better.
I don’t like eBay and Amazon for the same reasons – they are ugly and crowded, and they remind me of a run-down dollar store. But I think that’s the idea since they are obviously very successful sites. They are both very plain, but not in a classy, modern minimalist kind of way. They use very bright, in-your-face colors, and, given that you go there to click on stuff, figuring out what exactly to click on is usually a problem. At least for me, it’s hard see which links will get me where I’m trying to go. There doesn’t seem to be much hierarchy or a dominant image on the page, and I usually get a little stressed out when I first look at them – it takes me a while to get oriented to their layout and organization.
