Elements of Motion, Pacing, & ActionScript
HTML5 Videos are special because it a video library that will work in all of major web browsers, including Internet Explorer. It will make it easier to put videos on web pages and load videos on devices that currently do not support Flash.
The spat I believe is going to hurt designers and developers because they are going to have a harder time making web sites compatible with all devices and browsers, if they can’t load on some things people won’t view them or won’t get the full effect intended by the designer.
Files & Servers
Web Standards are some compliances that designers should follow to help make it easier for all people using any browser to view and be able to use a web page easily.
The main advantage is that the standards actually don’t limit creativity as many people believe but actually make design less difficult because developers use less time to create the design and have more time and more flexibilty to be truly creative about the project they are working on.
Business advantages are speed development, simplify maintenance and increase opportunity, open up access options, reduce bandwidth costs, improve user experience, and justify the switch.
A List Apart has alot to do with why some of the newer standards will not work with the older browsers that are out there and are still being used.
Browsers are going to continue to update just as fast as the web standards if not even faster because if they don’t these older browser will not support the newer web standards and coding abilities of design programs. They are also going to have to work harder to get people who are set on using the older browsers to upgrade to the newer ones so that the newer or updated sites will load and run correctly.
Chapter 15
Information Architecture is the use of site diagrams and wireframes to organize web sites.
Card sorting is a way that many use as an input for the structure of a site or product. It is used because it is a quick, inexpensive & reliable method of organizing information.
The top mistakes are no structure, search & structure not integrated, missing category landing pages, extreme polyhierarchy, subsites poorly integrated with the main site, invisible navigation options, uncontrollable navigation elements, inconsistent navigation, too many navigation techniques, & made up menu options.
What I take from it is that most people want to believe that the viewer will read all the information presented to them on a website about a product, service, or whatever, but in all reality all the viewer usually does is just scan over the pages picking up the main parts and leaving the small details unnoticed.
Web Design Process
The Web Design Process includes:
- Know what your doing
- Know what the site needs to do in the end
- Figure out what the visitors to the site want
- Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
- Sketch some successful scenarios
- Organize a site map
- Sketch out some of the essential features
- Map out the visitors’ attention
- Arrange the visual elements to work together
Overall these are the basic steps that web designers take when designing sites and most processes are about the same and fairly consistent.
My current design process is very similar to the ones in the articles I definately plan out stuff before I start and I tend sketch down ideas when I get them otherwise I sometimes lose the idea before I can put it into action or I can’t get it quite the way I want it or originally pictured it being.
Style and Design
Some issues that are faced in the design of web pages are keeping a consistent look and layout for the site, using color contrast correctly, correct use of white space, and simplicity.
Using a consistent look and layout for a website is very important because if you don’t some people might believe they have navigated away from your site onto another one.
Without color contrast used correctly a website might not be very easy to navigate or even just read or look at the content.
White space and simplicity are very important as well. They’re important because without them a website could become overly cluttered looking and hard to navigate through easily.
Graphics on the Web
Optimizing graphics is very important when it comes to file size, it cuts down on the overall page size, but also saves bandwidth by having smaller files, which makes the page load much faster.
Graphics are used on websites in many ways but they are mainly used to make a site more memorable and to make it stand out to people.
Graphics can become major content on websites. Graphics sometimes can convey just as much information as text alone. Many times graphics convey the information in a more easy to understand form than just using text alone.
Graphics appear differently from computer to computer no doubt, but the biggest issue is how the colors appear and whether the graphics will fit within the monitor screen. Color is probably one of the biggest issue I have faced even when I’ve used colors that are web-safe. Between my laptop and desktop computer there are some major differences that I’ve noticed. You’ve really got to be careful there because some colors that look normal on one screen look neon or just plain awful on the other.
Design Styles
The different classifications of web design styles that are most commonly used include illustrated designs, black and white, just black, new old paper, extremely colorful or bright colors, sketch artist designs, old paper based sketches, very minimal, and design using wood.
The styles that I like the most are the designs that incorporate the wood element, the brightly colored designs, and the designs with black used as the main color.
I like the using the element of wood in designs because it looks great to begin with not only, but also it takes a little more effort and practice to make it look right.
Brightly colored designs are very neat looking because they definitely catch the attention of the eye.
When it comes to using black or another dark color for background would have to be one of my favorites because it is very user friendly because of the high contrast it makes everything stand out more. I like using a black background with bright colored elements so that text and other elements used in the design itself.
Editing
Photoshop makes it extremely easy to edit photos from a photoshoot because all you need is someone who knows how to use the tools offered correctly and then your photos can be made completely perfect, sometimes too perfect.
I think using photoshop to edit photos for magazines is acceptable but only to a point, I think you should be able to edit out small glitches things such as light reflections that take away from the quality of the photo. I don’t that you should be able to take it as far as editing the image so much that it doesn’t even look like the original.
When you edit a photo to the point that it no longer looks like the original, then people who are familiar with the powerful tools of photoshop don’t always realize the damage done to a photo. When you edit a photo that much it makes it very misleading and it makes the photo look so perfect that it doesn’t even look realistic, but yet some believe that those pictures are.
I think that if you are using photoshop to edit the photo to improve the color or quality, your within the boundaries of editing but once you start editing so much that the image becomes too perfect, then you have went to far.
Tonal Range
The histogram is a bar graph that shows the range of brightness that make up an image. The histogram tool is a very useful tool in Photoshop because it make editing images much easier by allowing it to become harder to allow other adjustments to get out of control and harming your the image your working on instead helping it.
The hue/saturation tool can be very helpful when editing images because this tool allows you to be able determine how vibrate the colors appear in your image that you are working on.
Photoshop
When scanning images it is better to use the high quality setting for scanning the image in, it will take longer to scan the image in but in the end it will result with a better overall image.
The difference between resizing an image and resampling one involves whether or not the number of pixels is affected. Resizing an image only changes the sixe the image will pring without changing the number of pixels the image has, while resampling the image actually changes the number of pixels within the image itself.
