making up for lost time!

Hey people! sorry i haven't blog lately, I lost my password for the blog, but i found it so for now on i will be making up for lost time. I wanted to share with u guys one of my favorite website so, ENJOY! www.goodbrush.com

This is horrifying...

Fair warning: The following might induce seizures in photosensitive epileptics. I'm not kidding.

In time for Halloween, the most horrifically designed website I have ever seen. I have to assume the effect was intentional, because it doesn't seem like something you'd accidentally create. I'm not sure why they would do this, because it was disconcerting and disorienting to look at for more than a few seconds, and seems to have left some lingering afterimages in my vision. The good news is that the owners of the site have seen the error of their ways, and fixed it in recent versions.

Web Accessibility

I stumbled across this website today, and was amused by the lengths they've gone with accessibility. The site has four text sizes for their standard 'beauty' template, and an additional four sizes in a high-contrast black-and-white template.

CMS cliche

A CMS site that uses the CMS cliches is ugly. I'm sorry.

I've seen enough rounded corners, bubbley buttons, gradients, large fonts, orange and blue and lime green layouts to last me a lifetime.

Bottom line: if it's a preset. if it's easy to do. if you kept the style that way because the template was made that way... it's going to look dated soon and everyone will know it was made easily with CMS.

This is also sometimes referred to as a web 2.0 style.

Here's an image someone created to demonstrate some of the most over-used graphics of CMS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Web_2.0_style_example.png

We Put Up A Good Fight

Alright...so the SOX lost BUT, we did put up a good fight. If I had to lose then that is the way I feel OK doing it....putting up a fight and not to the Yankees. Enough with that.

So this CMS looks pretty good...and getting into it, we will see how easy it is? Does anyone feel like its not gonna be as easy as it looks??

One of my friends is quite a bit ahead of me when it comes to building sites. I think he used CMS on his site.

Check it out and let me know what you think
http://niteshpatel.com/wp/about/welcome-to-niteshpatelcom

So I leave you with of course another animation site.
This guy is a great animator at PIXAR and one of the creators of Animation Mentor.
Check it out:
http://www.carlosbaena.com/

Cya
John Paul

Scaling Backgrounds & Help

Hey Ryan, in response to your first question, 'stretching' web pages are generally produced from using percentage-based div scaling, clever use of absolute positioning and or the use of relative positioning. It's a little more involved that the type of web creation we've done in class, but pretty easy to pick up. If you can show a specific example, I could possibly tell you how it was done. As for your title, just pop open either the HTML code, or Dreamweaver and change the title to whatever you want. In Dreamweaver it should be a small box at the top of the page, in the code it should be near the top, enclosed in title tags: <title>Untitled Document<\title> (The slash is facing the wrong way so it will show up in this post)

I found an interesting page on scaling backgrounds from Web Designer Wall (GOTOCHINA) and picked apart the code if anyone wants a starting point for creating something like this. Just keep in mind the image generally loses a lot of quality as it scales.

CSS

*{border:0px solid #eee;margin:0;padding:0;list-style:none}
html,body,#bg,#bg table,#bg td,#cont{width:100%;height:100%;overflow:hidden}
body{font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10px;cursor:default;background:url(loading.gif);color:#000}
img{display:block}
#bg div{position:absolute;width:200%;height:200%;top:-50%;left:-50%}
#bg td{vertical-align:middle;text-align:center}
#bg img{min-height:50%;min-width:50%;margin:0 auto}
#cont{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;z-index:70;overflow:auto}
#top{color:#FF9966;height:56px;background-color:#000000;opacity:.5;}
#mid{width:513px;height:474px;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;margin-top:25px;}

HTML (Removed Brackets from each line><)

body
div id="cont"
div id="top"
/div
div id="mid"
/div
/div
/div
div id="bg"
div
table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
tr
td
img alt="" src="bg.jpg" /
/td
/tr
/table
/div
/div
/body

2 Questions

I apologize, of course, for never having any interesting web news to share, but rather only posting here to ask all of you smart folks for help. But here are my questions this week:

1) I've noticed that there are many web pages that stay in the center by seemingly stretching themselves out rather than just staying proportionally from the margins. Does anyone know how to achieve this?

2) My web site is titled 'untitled' at the top of the page (ryanpeoplessound.com). What did I do wrong?

Thanks everyone. One of these times I'll have something for all of you. Maybe for your birthday.

Ryan

IE Css Hacks

Hey guys, if you haven't noticed yet, some settings may look different in Explorer vs Firefox. I found a great post on how to fix small problems between the two. If you're having issues, definitely worth a look..

CSS Hack


For example, if a div on your page is too low in Explorer, but looks fine in Firefox:

Declare the CSS normally for IE

#holder {
position: relative;
width: 500px;
top: -3px;
height: 55px;
left: 29px;
}

Then restate the options you want to change with body>html in front of the tag..

html>body #holder{
top:4px;
}

Firefox can read the second CSS entry for the #header tag, but Explorer can not. Hope this helps anyone having cross-browser issues.

Midterm ramblings

Wow....5 weeks already gone. I can't believe we start signing up for classes again next week. SCAD is very fast paced.

Well, I don't really have any useful links to add to the mix this time around... perhaps next time.

But for all of you college football fans out there, if you haven't heard Tommy Bowden got the sack! Actually, I don't quite know if he got fired or if he just randomly decided to quit mid season....whatever the case may be, this is great news for the Gamecocks. Maybe they will actually beat Clemson this year! woowhoo! Plus it's a perfect opportunity to tease certain family members who graduated from Clemson...ok, or all my family members...lol (*is the black sheep of the family).

Good luck to everyone on midterms! Go! Get those websites done!
cheers!

This is a site I came across a while back for a company that builds luxury yachts (you may recognize their 118 foot power yacht from Michael Bay's insipid film The Island). They've done a pretty good job of presenting a pretty substantial amount of information with a simple layout that remains small enough to fit on almost all screens.

Hey...

UPDATE: SOX tied in series 1-1 with an afternoon game today.

The new website seems to be going well...we'll see about when I try to center everything , cause of course I am one of those people that like my sites in the center.

Of course I leave you with an animation resource site.
Enjoy

http://animationtipsandtricks.com/

JP

Mashed Potatoes

What's so interesting about mashed potatoes that I would write a post about them? Their feelings mostly. I was watching something on cable the other day and some crazy chic was going on about fruits and vegetables and their feeling, and announcing that cooking and eating said fruit/veg is murder. She's a loon, hands down, but today I feel their 'pain.'

My brain is experiencing a sensation that must parallel the 'pain' that those starchy little buggers go through when we beat the hell out of them and serve them up with butter. We've all been there, that place where you exists but you're not good for a whole lot. If on the other hand you need someone who can sit for hours staring blankly at white walls, I'm your girl.

So my deepest sympathy to all the potatoes that have been sacrificed at the alter of dinner.

Now I have to get back to my white wall.

Some great way to make fonts

Hey everybody

Another week down and another year that the Red Sox have made it into the playoffs!!!
I can sense that everybody reading is as excited as I am!
1st game is Friday night.

On a different note...in my research for web site design I ran across this site to build some
cool fonts in Photoshop...so cheers.

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/photoshop-text-tutorials/

JP

Micro Compact Home

Micro Compact Home

I thought this was a neat site, which plays off the shape of their main product with a square motif, and the cool colors mirror the color scheme of the m-ch.

The m-ch itself is a neat bit of design work, but since this isn't an industrial design class, I won't wax poetic about it.

The Color Vs. The Shape

Through filtering what I believe represents some of the best overall designs on the web, there is still a very hard line between good layout and good design. Of those sites I found appealing, only a select couple seem to "get" harmonious blending of structure and visual pleasantry. Some of the conclusions I've come to after surfing these sites include the following.

- Conceptual and "innovative" layouts aren't worth anything if they don't navigate well. Period.

- Use photos sparingly. They should never dominate the look.

- Certain colors, when paired accurately, give the viewer a mood right off the bat. Some sites just amazed me if for no other reason than the way the colors made me feel.

- Keep it simple. A busy site is an immediate turn off.

- Icons can work well, but avoid the common ones. Design your own to fit the theme.

- Easter Eggs are fun, but unless it's an "entertainment" type website, leave them be.

- Avoid theming that already relates to something else. If your fonts look like Napoleon Dynamite's sketchbook handwriting, that's what people will connect it with.

- The first third of your page should include all of the following if you have them as assets: Logo, company name, contact info, quick link bar, slogan
I found this article from Smashing Magazine that shows some of the current trends and once current trends, now cliched. I thought it was a good read and pretty on the money.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/26/navigation-menus-trends-and-examples/

I Dunno

Well, I think everyone has already put enough links about current website trends for all of us to gather enough inspiration...so I don't think I'll add to the list. I would rather discuss midnight snacking. I gotta tell ya, it's 12:53 right now and I could really go for a big hamburger. Is it a good idea? Probably not, but what's a guy to do when he eats tiny meals all day in attempts to maintain a weight that he's already unhappy with? I mean, don't get me wrong. It feels so good to put healthy food in your body, but its times like these when you want to undo the hard work you committed to all day, and just lay into some chicken tenders. Am I right or am I right? I don't think any place that sells chicken tenders is open right now, but you get my point.

Now its a crying shame that America is all about weight loss. I saw a documentary the other day that suggests that weight loss is simply a temporary "fix" to making people more healthy and to make them feel better about themselves. Its temporary because once you've lost the weight you have to work doubly hard to keep it off, and if you don't work hard, then its gonna come back twofold. How freaking depressing! A therapist on the documentary also brought up a good point about obesity being just like any other type of mental disorder, saying "You wouldn't ask a clinically depressed person to think happy thoughts, and assume that everything will suddenly be ok, so how can you ask an obese person to just stop eating and lose weight?" I guess I'm just tired of society placing so much emphasis on being as thin and in shape as possible because let's face it, your heart will only beat so many beats before it gives out, and no amount of dieting will ever change that fact.

So there's a little insight to my thoughts for the evening. Thanks to everyone who posted all the inspirational websites! They will come in handy this weekend for my site design. Seacrest out.

- D

Hours of FUN

http://www.yearbookyourself.com/

Hierarchy

I've noticed that a lot of site (most likely using CSS) have a blog format with an emphasis on hierarchy of information. This hierarchy is shown through type treatment, especially contrast between titles, body txt and links. ILoveTypography does a beautiful job, with nice typeface choices to boot.

p.s. notice how this site uses Serifs a lot, and well.

More sites...

http://www.stainless-design.eu/

http://www.monolab.cl/

http://www.thibaud.be/

http://europe.nokia.com/musicalmighty

http://www.fat-man-collective.com/

p.s. I am finding a lot of these on www.thefwa.com

Useful links for inspiration

Here are just 2 sites I found that are in some ways similar to web designer's wall.

http://bestwebgallery.com/

http://webtecker.com/2008/05/13/guide-to-stay-on-top-of-web-design-trends/

Current Trends: Trendy Sites

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/2008-design-trends/

http://webtecker.com/2008/05/13/guide-to-stay-on-top-of-web-design-trends/

Inspirational Site!

Amazing, inventive and insane website balled up in one. Enjoy


Check it.
http://www.creaktif.com/