in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project

http://www.inbflat.net/

Client Project - Bulrush festival

Our latest multimedia project is an assigned client project in groups of three. I will be building a website for Folkwit records for their Bulrush Festival in Nottingham. I have taken on the role of web applications designer, focusing on the database and functional php elements of the projects, my the rest of my group, Kirsty Lockhart and Matt Underwood will be designing the U.I and Flash elements respectively.

So far several complications have arisen. I have managed to access the clients server via my own FTP but efforts to access their database have been unfruitful. Remote access does not work so I am setting about installing phpmyadmin on the subdomain I have been assigned. I will also be building the back-end or 'admin panel' for this projects and I have decided to use 'Tiny MCE' a WYSIWYG text editor to make the admin UI as user friendly as possible.

I will post more updates once I have either successfully connected to the database or installed 'Tiny MCE'.

Getting Creative With CSS

http://versionsapp.com/

Design Exercise Complete

Here is my finished restaurant website. I plan on offering to sell this website with improved functionality and a CMS which I will build with Phil to The Golden Fleece pub.

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/goldenfleece/

http://maeda.ads.ntu.ac.uk/~n0191521/goldenfleece/

Light Box

http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/

Design Exercise: Analysing Restaurant Sites

I decided to browse through some of the more sophisticated dining restaurants in Nottingham and luckily, I found this, the "Nottinghamshire Restaurant Awards". So I took a sample of 5 websites to review to develop a better understanding of what is required (or in some cases not required) to produce my own effective website...

1. www.mem-saab.co.uk
   
   Memsaab won the award for best Indian restaurant, unfortunately for them I don't think they would win the award for best website. The most disappointing thing about their site is that it is entirely in Flash, with no HTML alternative and that it doesn't even make an effective use of the medium. Images and text fade in, which is nice but that is as ambitious as it gets, this could easily all be displayed in static reliable, accessible HTML/CSS. Oddly enough the website is even laid out in a very similar fashion to an HTML/CSS site, with a constant header and navigation along the top, only the content below this changes. This is a classic example of an ineffective use of Flash, all of this could have easily been achieved using more conventional scripting languages but because of Flash...
   
   
   
   • Pages takes longer to open (typically 2 to 10 times more)
   
   
   • The user must wait for the intro to complete
   
   
   • A plug-in must be installed (and updated every few months)
   
   
   • Animations are impossible to ignore
   
   
   • Navigation controls, such as the URL and the Back button, don't work
   
   
   List from Flashsucks.org
   
   
2. www.ibericotapas.com
   
   
Again this website could probably be achieved without the use of Flash and again there is no HTML/CSS alternative. Fortunately "Dark Water Designs" seem to have a better understanding of what makes Flash interesting. The website features many interesting animations and fade ins, it can't be denied that the website is very well presented with effective navigation. The only major issue is accessibility but I imagine most of Iberico Tapas' intended demographic will have a Flash plug in or be capable of installing one.


3. www.delilahfinefoods.co.uk
   
   This website has been made exclusively with HTML/CSS, from checking the source code there is no sign of Java or any other dynamic code. It appears that this site has been produced by a single free lance web designer, as there is no sign of design brand and the source code is very uniform, nicely laid out and easy to understand. The website is clear, tidy and functional, perhaps my only complaint is that there are two navigational menus. One menu is at the top, for what appears to be key content navigation and the left side menu for other details such as location and contact. There is almost no nested content so despite having two menus is fast and easy to find what your looking for. I also like that there is a different colour styling to each page without using different style sheets.



4. www.larwoodandvoce.co.uk
   
   Again this website is predominately HTML/CSS but looking at the source code there is a little bit of Ajax. The navigation is relatively straight forward but again there is top and side navigation. There is very little nested content apart from the home page where there is dual top navigation that seems arbitrary and inconsistent with the rest of the site and almost suggests the developer used an existing style template. Another complaint would be that clicking on the top banner takes you to a 404 instead of a the home page which suggests the site hasn't been thoroughly tested. Apart from these subtle flaws the layout is nice, content is easy to find and there is a nice image gallery that uses Light Box 2.0.



5. www.worldservicerestaurant.com
   
   What's nice about this website is that it takes many different scripting methods and combines, HTML/CSS with Flash elements and Java navigation. Apart from this the most interesting feature is that all information is displayed horizontally, unfortunately this is flawed in two ways. Firstly, although the emphasis is on the horizontal, the website is still so large vertically that you cannot display the whole thing in a standard 800x600 browser window. In fact you can't see any of the navigation and you can't scroll down to see it either as the content is in a Java drop down. Secondly, there is so much information that needs to be displayed, that the designer has resorted to using vertical scroll boxes. ThiS pretty much leaves the idea of horizontal space redundant. A nice idea but poorly executed.

Vriesea

"Finally, now with exams finished, I've thought up a new project, called Vriesea. Which is a not for profit service aiming to offer internet 'facilities' and hosting to non-profit freedom of speech, internet related, music, media and other worthwhile projects. Thanks to Tim and Evo Hosting for helping out with a domain, I'll be reporting back with some progress in the near future."
- Phil Howell www.quae.co.uk

A project Phil and I plan on starting under Hexademic New Media.

Restaurant Website Design Exercise...

"Brief:

You are required to produce a website with a minimum of three inter-related pages on the restaurant theme as described in Seminar 1. You have three weeks to complete!
The website can be static, animated and/or interactive. It can contain audio and film footage if required. It can be full page flash if desired but provide alternative accessible pages too please!"

I plan on producing a website for The Golden Fleece, a pub on my road that does good food and live music too. The pub seems to have strong connections with Nottingham's Left Lion, the local live music scene and also it has a strong visual aesthetic which gives me plenty to work with.

Once I've seen what's out there already, in terms of pub/restaurants websites, I'll go have a look around and take a few photos for inspiration...

PHP for Noobs

http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/diving-into-php-video-series/

2 Projects I've been working on over the Holidays

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/hexatest/
Website for Hexademic new media.

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/dirtymanchallenge/
Website for a dirty man challenge that I am taking part in.

Crowd Spring

While on Holiday in Slovenia I met various English people who now live there at a house party. In particular I met a freelance graphic designer who showed me something very interesting, an online market place called Crowd Spring (http://www.crowdspring.com/). Here potential buyers will post specifications for various projects they have going. Graphic designers, web designers, creatives etc. can get a hold of these specifications and submit their ideas, then the buyer will choose their favourite and pay the winning entry. These projects can pay out anything from $100 to several thousand dollars, so its certainly worth checking out.

Flash Contact Form

http://www.scotflash.co.uk/blog/?p=13

Contrasts in Design

Design, especially in web design can swing between form and function. There is a balance between functional and flamboyant design, between html and Flash. Now I shall take an opportunity to briefly analyse these difference and see where they cross over.



indoorheroes.com -
I found this a particularly interesting website to briefly study as I indirectly know the designer. Indoorheroes.com was both built and designed by Joey Rabbitt, a freelance web designer. Personally I find this website brilliant in terms of functionality, the website is primarily a web comic and there is clear emphasis on that with a large display and clear navigation buttons in both internationally recognisable symbols and written text.
If you are looking for more than a web comic, there is obviously a lot more information to be found here, including a blog, a secure comment system so fans of the comic can interact with each other and the author and a news and articles feed. If you want to further browse this additional information there are drop down menus for filtering and sorting content, making it very easy to find something specific.

The website also crosses over and overlaps with other aspects of design, for example the option to choose from various themes. Users or clients have the ability to change the visual style of the site to suit their own tastes; this appears to be achieved through java script and css. The only flash elements used are for advertising in standardised banner sizes, although at present all banners are static jpgs.



locoroco.com –
This website promotes the Loco Roco game series for the Sony Playstation. Being flash you immediately notice that it is difficult to navigate through content quickly as you are constantly waiting between menus and as a result waiting through preloaders. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the web site is very attractive but some times the visuals can be a bit much and confusing in terms of finding specific content.

Again there is a cross over, where Flash can achieve the impossible compared to html or css. The Loco Roco website has essentially recreated a part of the game on the website, perhaps like a demo, which is invaluable in this specific context. Potential buyers would love to get to grips with the game before buying it.

Evolution of Hexademic New Media

Whilst browsing through the OEP Ning, I found Shaun Belcher has added an Industry tab. Here I found several links to new media firms in the east midlands, one in particular called Evoluted. At first I found the website a little corporate and stale but after viewing their portfolio and reading through their content I realised I could learn a great deal from these guys, especially in terms of features and functionality. Hexademic New Media needs a website and I think this has finally inspired me to start building it.

Edit: I also found this very interesting www.erskinedesign.com

Web Design Assignment

I've started making progress on the web design assignment (a three page html site with three flash objects). I have been drawing up designs in CSS using my new scratch built CSS template. Its proving to be a faster way of drafting designs than photoshop. See my current progress here.

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/about/

G.I.R

After painting a Mighty Mugg to look like Master Chief, I think I rekindled my love for painting (in a very unconventional sense). I brought some paints and started painting once more, perhaps in a more traditional manner this time, on a canvas. I painted a character called G.I.R from a cartoon called Invader Zim as a gift for a very remarkable person. I plan on attending several life drawing sessions at the Waverly building to further hone my abilities as a artists as well as a designer.

CSS Template

I have produced my own CSS template for when I wish to quickly produce simple websites. As much as we may hate to admit it, most websites will boil down to some sort of header, sidebar and content area. I have used a set of my own labels for class and id tags which I will now try and standardize every time I build a site or style sheet. I have also told Phil who I work with on Hexademic projects about my CSS template so he can not only quickly interpret my style sheets but edit them also.

View my Template here: http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/css/

View my style sheet here: http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/css/style.css

Touch Browsing

Touch screens are evidently the future of computerised interaction, its simply a more natural ergonomic way of working with something. As a result designers, including myself, don't necessarily need to know how to produce touch screen software but design with it in mind. I need to start asking myself, how would somebody viewing this page on a Iphone or other hand held, receive this website? Obviously the first thing to consider is page sizes but there are several other issues to address such as plug ins, will this flash object be visible? Do I need an html version for other users?

It would also be wise to start thinking about developing a touch screen based Flash .swf or even an application, perhaps using something like Coco, as used by the Iphone. Currently my coding skills don't go far beyond html and css but it would be good to at least try and get involved in some of these exciting new projects by contacting the professionals who work in this field.

Un.Titled

http://un.titled.co.uk/

Active Ingredient

Active Ingredient is a Nottingham based design firm who work with interactives, web design and more... Their website features full page flash and many interactive elements including a drawing tool and image gallery of other people’s drawings. As the current 3 page HTML/Flash assignment is almost already achieved through my existing projects (such as the NTU Gamer Society website) I have been asked to look into more advanced ideas, such as the projects that Active Ingredient are working on. Although I am still very much a PHP rookie and I would like to devote most of my time to OEP Web Applications, Flash cannot be over looked especially in terms of interactive features. In the near future I will further analyse the work of active ingredient and the importance of interactive design in the multimedia industry.