Almost finished..

Well I am almost finished with my website and to my relief, I have finally implemented a photo gallery to share my doodles. The gallery I chose was quite hard to get my head around and thus extremely frustrating to get working! I chose to use “Lightbox 2.04″ by Lokesh Dhakar. Also, in order for my images to display how I wanted them to on my page, I had to implement a

which made sure only the horizontal scroll bar appeared.

More progress

I am still chugging along with the coding, and am adding stuff as I see fit. Below is a working example of my website so far…

Check it out

To get the effect I wanted, I had to slice my navigation up in photoshop then create CSS classes to support each different rollover. Frustratingly tedious, but rewarding. As you can see from the image below, I tried to minimise the amount of potential loading time. To do this, I made sure all of my nav slices would have the same width.

Check it out!

Stay tuned…

Update

Well, I have been working on my website. Currently, I am battling difficulties implementing a navigation that I like. I am avoiding at all costs just slicing up and table-ing my layout. I am also having trouble keeping images high enough resolution, whilst still keeping loading times to a minimum. Despite these time-old foreseen problems, my overall progress seems to be steady. I have no shortage of doodles as my mind and pen wander off whilst I am working! Check it out…

Raw version

Banner in context…

Direction

As the semester moves forward, my direction once again is skewed….  Blogs in my opinion are meant to be steady streams of consciousness relating to a specific subject matter.  Is this really me?  Am I really capable of keeping the same train of thought for a whole semester?  At 19, no.  Ironically, this is what I would like to convey through my personal website.  Is this another adolescents cheesy, overdone teenage angst year 12 HSC artwork?  I hope not, I would say it is much too personal.  My website is a visual blog, dictated by themes and colour schemes.  Mockups for my initial design will be posted later in the week.

Stay tuned…

Graffiti

Some examples of my graffiti, scanned in…

Website research…

Ah, I don’t know how anyone can stand blogging…It’s like I am forcing myself to be a more extroverted person. I’ve never kept a journal or diary, it’s just not me. Can’t one just not be a blogger?

On to more relevant and pressing issues…

http://www.google.com

In my opinion Google is an excellent example of good, functional design. Google is currently the most used search engine on the internet, commanding a whopping 80% of the market share[1]. But how? What has Google realised that its competitors Yahoo! and MSN haven’t?

Search engine market share

On the surface, Google appears to be one of the most basic pages on the internet. This is, in my opinion, the root of their success. Google have managed to create a simple, yet very intuitive and aesthetically pleasing search engine. Users are not bombarded by information, but greeted by a subtle banner and a text input field. Not much thought is necessary to figure out how things work! Google almost comes as a relief from the content rich websites that await within your search. It’s almost ironic that the ‘root’ or ‘index’ of the internet appears to be one of the most simple pages in existence!

Google has opened my eyes to the importance of good design in a service orientated website. A website should be as interpretable as possible. After all, the more people that understand and can use your website, the more traffic you are bound to get.

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References

[1] Search Engine Market Share, August 2008

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4#

Website concept

I could never have foreseen having to create a website when I enrolled for this subject.

Lies aside, I would like to create a ’simple’, blog like, personal website. My website would contain content that interest me, be it random ramblings at 3am or informative news articles from the Herald. Main content aside, what is interesting about my website is how I visually represent this information. I doodle a lot… I mean, a lot and I have done it non-stop my entire academic life. I have to say, I am very proud of the ‘profound’ graphical ramblings I produce. I would go so far as saying it is a personality trait that defines part of me and I guess I would like my personal homepage to reflect this.

I would love my website to incorporate theme changes. I’m not too sure of the interval between these theme changes, but I would like it to reflect my current doodling style. My websites theme will always fill set criteria. Incorporated themes must be hand drawn with a blue or black biro pen (that is after all the type of pen I sit in class with). These themes are then scanned into Photoshop/Illustrator to be sliced and touched up. Drawing influence from CSS: Zen Garden (see previous post), I would like to keep the same bare HTML code every theme change. Although the HTML doesn’t change, I will be altering the CSS. By following the Zen Garden’s example I hope to catalogue a decent visual and cognitive cross section of my life.

Good idea? Too rehashed? Comment that shiz…

edit; I am having trouble installing the correct drivers to post pictures of some doodling.

Art vs Design…

­­­­_­­­When I asked myself the question ‘what is the difference between art and design’ I literally frolicked to my desk, opened my exercise book and drew up a three columned table; one column for art, one column for design and one column for words suitable for art and design.  What ensued was a solid, adjective packed, thought provoking session of deliberating and debating.  I have to say, it really opened my eyes.  I realised that however fundamentally alike art and design may be, to be appreciated correctly one must value each disciplines subtle differences.

To begin, I think it is important to recognise the main similarity between art and design.  Both art and design, in general, stem from good ideas, good concepts.  This may seem obvious, but I feel it is important.  It shows that both art and design are the result of some sort of creative process that is based upon something. They both have reason.  Even if their reasons are entirely different, both art and design’s conceptual backing cannot be denied. I mean even dada art is ironically conceptual and even creative, contrary to what it’s anti-art creators claim…

Enough with that, now to the meat of it… what makes art, art and design, design?

In my opinion all art is subjective.  One draws their own meaning from a work of art, even if the derived meaning wasn’t intentional.  You show an image of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to a class of school kids and you will have a class full of interpretations. The fact that this is ok and is encouraged is what is important. Art is confronting, not necessarily negatively, but thought provoking.  Design on the other hand is not necessarily subjective. A user is allowed to derive their own meaning from a designed object, but may be forced to adhere to set design rules or laws.  Contrary to what art is, good design is looked upon favourably when it is pleasing, intuitive and not necessarily thought provoking. After all, why would someone design a door that is hard to open? Too much thought!

Art also seems to be a very spiritual, almost focusing on the ‘journey’ of creation. An artwork encompasses the heart and soul of the artist and unlike good design, not everything hinges on the final product. For example, an interactive artwork such as onacloV’s ‘Edible Audience’ continually changes and therefore has no real ‘final or end product’. Design however is different. Everything hinges on the final product. I mean, if someone did in fact design that door that was hard to open, it would simply be pawned off as bad design. No one would buy it; it just doesn’t fulfil the expected functions of a door.

Art and design in my opinion are different. Although I have only scratched the surface when comparing the two, I feel as though what has been brought up polarises the two disciplines. What is your opinion? Do you agree? Anything to add?

Website research

http://www.2advanced.com/

My uncle introduced me to this website, he was associated somehow with the creators. This is a flash based website that is used as a portfolio for a web design company. The site has many great links to websites they have created for large corporate clients. It’s quite nice, but with websites I prefer HTML/CSS over flash any day.

In my opinion this website is quite a good example of the integration between art and design that is found throughout the web. On one hand, the authors of the website want to express an element of artistic prowess in order to stand out, ‘be individual’ and bottom line, to gain more work with large ‘trendier’ and younger brands such as Nintendo. Whilst on the other hand there are many strong design elements which express and accentuate the companies technical ability. I don’t think there exists any pure design or pure art websites, but just different mixes between the two.

On another note, as for an explanation for why I have not been updating my blog…I had very large technical issues with my home PC. I had to replace its motherboard, CPU and transfer everything into a case that fit my new motherboard. Week long headache…..

edit; I just realised this was for some reason published private….

CSS Zen Garden

I bought an interesting book on CSS a while back and this is the associated website;

CSS Zen Garden
http://www.csszengarden.com

CSS Zen Garden is a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.” The creators of the website have allowed users to download the original Zen Garden HTML file and then create their own accompanying CSS file, which they then upload back to CSS Zen Garden to be showcased. The creation of a new CSS file greatly alters the design of the original website and showcases real usable techniques which can be used used for creating good looking, WC3 compliant websites.

Check it out!