Gah!

It's been too long! Rest assured I've been working my busy mind at the task of Assignment #2. My GIF image will be a room, and in that room there will be a television and a couch and a door and some other things too.

I'm thinking of having a lightbulb hanging in the middle of the room, and to have that lightbulb flicker on and off. Each time it flickers, something in the room changes. I'm predicting that this will be relatively easy to accomplish with the layers function in Photoshop, so I should be able to make a relatively complex GIF image (fingers crossed!)

Now! On to Jason's challenge from the last lecture.

http://www.webstyleguide.com/

It's terribly outdated, but I'm not really here to critique the site. (It is really really outdated though)

I can honestly say, after reading through all sorts of stuff about how you should be considerate of users with 8bit displays (ha!), that I had never properly considered the text I put in my titles. The style guide says:

Always consider what your page title will look like in a long list of bookmarks. Will the title remind the reader of what he or she found interesting about your pages?

I'll be keeping that in mind, for sure. I never really thought about bookmarks, but in actual fact a great number of a website's users find the site via a bookmark (except for those users who just use Google each and every time).

And so that's what I learned!

Imagine...

Imagine if YouTube looked like this:

If You Have a Soul - Kill Me

Other things kept me from starting sooner: lame I know. But this is my progress so far.

The purple represents white. I'm doing a find->replace after I'm done.

I am not going to bed until this logo is done. It's doable. Totally doable. But really, really fiddly.

I'm hoping a series of Google-owned logos will emerge tomorrow.

EDIT: Hour and a half later

Well it looks pretty good so far. What sucks about doing it the CSS way (I couldn't resize the cells in a table) is that you can't just up and move the 'Google' bit to another part of the page. If you wanted to move it you'd have to start all over again. Not fun.

Thus I'm thinking I might just make this a really, really big mosaic of logos owned by Google. They'll be scattered here and there across the screen. It looks like I can make one of these in just under two hours, so I might be able to do... four more? Five?

I'm wondering if white is the best background to have this against. You can't see all the hard work I've put into the many white squares in the logo. Then again if it stays white it looks closer to the Google homepage. I might experiment near the end.

But for now; bed! Good grief!

Next Artwork - GIFstyle!

Confession: I've been avoiding this blog. Animated GIFs, for some reason do not inspire me at all. I took notes in that class and everything and the best I could come up with was drawing my own cartoons in Photoshop.

I sometimes draw my own cartoons in Photoshop, did you know that? Well I do. They are pretty good even if I do say so myself, but to animate them would take oodles of hours worth. I think I could only do one, and the thought of it being unimpressive after all the work that would go into it makes me feel slightly uneasy.

Although... the thought of Random Chicken and Black Duck having a faceoff warms my little heart. Just, like, a little bit.



Although drawing in their wings and angry faces is a daunting prospect. Perhaps I'll animate something else - like the giant green ant?


The possibilities are endless, limited only by my technical incompetence.

I'll figure something out surely. Maybe I'll just animate a whole little scene of a flashing TV sitting in a livingroom which makes the room change colour with every flash? Is that enough work for a good enough mark? I guess it depends on the time involved.

Yes. I'll work something out.

Web Artwork Idea

Ever since the dot.com boom there have been all sorts of companies that have only ever existed online. They are nebulous entities which buy and sell and provide services, but they do not have a 'storefront' that the general public can walk into in the traditional sense.

Also, companies which previously only existed in 'real life' have now moved to digital format, either to compliment their real life formats (such as online news services) or to completely replace them.

One of the most important things online is site branding, so that the user can tell 'where they are'. One of the best ways to achieve good site branding is to have a logo. Usually logos reside in the top lefthand side of the page (on pages where script is read left to right).

How much of the information in the logo is important? Could, say, Blogger still be recognised as Blogger if it were reduced to dozens of equally-sized squares?

My idea is to take logos found online and try to roughly recreate them using HTML tables full of hexadecimal colours. The example I have here isn't very good, but it displays my idea. I couldn't recreate the "Blogger" text because I couldn't easily make an equally-sized grid in photoshop that I could fill in. Also in this example you can probably see that the 'squares' I used weren't exactly square. The brush I used didn't neatly fill the canvas so I had to fudge it a bit. But like I said, it displays my idea.

Also, what would happen if I combined a pixelised blogger logo with other pixelised logos of online services owned by Google - like YouTube? I can imagine mosaics of bright colours, spattered with black and white squares. The Google mosaic would be rather eclectic, considering its habit of buying out small startups but keeping their old branding. Microsoft's mosaic would be rather more uniform, considering they start up their own services and brand them all the same way (the "Live" brand).

Microsoft are acquiring Yahoo! and all its services (such as Flickr) - how would that affect the Microsoft mosaic?

Rocking the Rock Rockers 2 - Gettin' an Educashun

The next two sites I want to cover are places that you go for learning about stuff. It's a fairly general subgrouping I know - that's what the internet is for isn't it?

Firstly, the W3Schools site has saved me from certain doom many, many times in the past. If you want to know anything about HTML code or all the other, more complicated, stuff that works with HTML code, then this is basically the only site you need to go to.

It's basically a site of tutorials on how to do stuff. All sorts of stuff. I'm not so hot at HTML, so I've used this site off and on for a while now - mostly to brush up when I've gotten rusty.There are step-by-step tutorials on how to do all sorts of things though. Things I've never even heard of before. It's a really well designed site too - easy to use.

The other site I'm going to talk about I've never actually used before Jason sent it to me in an email. MetaCritic is basically a reviews site that reviews everything - books, music, movies, DVDs, everything! Looking over their 'MetaScore' FAQ it looks like they don't actually have reviewers of their own, but that the site acts like a review-collector - compiling reviews from a number of sources. The only other site that I can think of which does a similar thing is rottentomatoes.com, but Rottentomatoes only reviews movies.

(EDIT 18/Mar/08: Fancy that, Wikipedia actually compares MetaCritic with Rottentomates as well. According to Wikipedia, MetaCritic mostly sources American critics, whereas Rottentomatoes mostly sources critics from the UK. This is an important difference because it often colours the reviews.)

Personally though, I don't think I'll use this site for my review needs. If you didn't have a good source for reviews, I think the multi-review aspect would be a great bonus. However I think that it could never be as good as one or two review sources that you personally find you really trust. For movies I use good ol' Margaret and David. They're not as snobby as you might think. With Margaret and David you don't just get the star rating (anything above 3/5 is worth seeing) but you also get their thought on why they thought it was good or not. That way I can still figure out if I'll hate a movie they said they loved, because of the reasons they give. I don't think you can ever get that with a huge multi-review site like MetaCritic.

Rocking the Rock Rockers - Web Resources

Covering two web resources today. Both are social-networking type sites.

Ever heard of Twitter? Someone invited me to join it today and for some reason I did. I honestly don't know why because I told myself I wouldn't be joining any more networking things. It's kind of good though I have to say. It's like Facebook and MySpcace without all the dangly crap.

The entire network is based around the question "What are you doing?" I think you're supposed to answer the question at least once a day to get the full experience out of the site. Of course, I quickly learned that if no one you know uses Twitter, its usefulness is incredibly diminished (much like any other social network).

What is cool about it though is that you can post what you are doing via SMS on your mobile phone. I did this today to test it out and it works fine, although I don't think I'll be doing it terribly often because it's so expensive (international SMS rates if you do not live in the United States).

Perhaps more useful to the casual user (who doesn't have a swarm of e-friends they need to keep track of) is Flickr. I've actually been signed up to Flickr for a while now, although I don't use it in its social capacity.

At its heart, Flickr is image storage. All I really use it for is to host the occasional image that I might need to link to for some reason. It works perfectly fine for all of that. However, much like YouTube you can get notifications of when other users add new content, and you can leave messages and comments for your 'contacts.'

What is great about Flickr is that almost every picture uploaded there is under a Creative Commons license, meaning you are free to use the images that appear on Flickr without fear of someone getting pissed at you (subject to conditions that are clearly represented below each image). This makes Flickr an image library which is incredibly easy to search and draw from.

Très handy for web developers and bloggers alike. The quality of some of the photos is amazing!