nuvver web layout idea

tell me what you think.

i like blossom.

working, working, working, working.

probs for teh website.

fio is on her hols.

one has been playing far too much guitar hero, mario galaxy and FF7.
i have access to so many games and consoles here, it's GOOD.
the internet is a bit pap though.

I've started working on the second CSS sheet for my site, as well as trying to find out how to set up my own web cam feed. i can't seem to find much really useful information about setting up a web cam feed, i've downloaded several programs but have no idea how to get the feed onto my site. more research needed methinks.

here is what it looks like so far:


needs ALOT more work, just hoping that my CSS swappy code works fine in the end. need to think of more patterns to use. at first i was going to go with something a bit floral, inspired by this pretty tree in the backgarden, but decided to go with pink cubes of doom.



not much is different from the original CSS sheet really, still need to work on the fonts and links.

i've also been reading this REALLY big book.



for my final major project i want to do something with processing, at the moment i'm still trying to find out what's possible (it's seems that almost anything is really). i'm just hoping i'm not biting off more than i can chew.

working ones arse off.

one has been doing.

i've now got the work part of my site mostly done.
finding and resizing so many images makes my arm feel bad.

here's the jist of it.



yeah.

nice web design hints

both of my following linkys are from pingmag a nice little tokyo based design site. here's five steps to CSS, if you're looking to refine and tidy up your CSS a bit (i am), and a nice little article about the website development process when you have to work with a client. it's so cyoooote.

pixely thoughts

reminiscing about the days i spent in MS paint with lovely pixels, and crappy water colour kids paint. and considering how to make a CSS layout based on banana sandwiches or marmalade.



hmm...

wordpress

since several of the sites i'm quite fond of (like brendan dawes and joshua davis) use wordpress i decided to look into it. using a blog type thing would be a nice way of easily updating my site. but i'm concerned about how easy it will be to customise.

i've looked around on the forums and the wordpress site and installed it on my own site, so i can have a little play with it. but since all i'm really thinking of using it for is a news feed and possibly making some kind of commenting system on the work in my portfolio (which i'm not too fussed about), i'm not sure wether or not i will end up using it at this stage.

i could use it to create another blog on my site, but since i'm planning to re-design this one and i talk about my work on here i don't see much of a point.

i could do a bit of cheating with iframes, but that could mess up my plan to use that CSS swappy code.

i want to be able to design my site exactly how i want it, instead of re-working a template. there's blogger and myspace for that.

i don't know what the hell just happened.

pretty ain't it? all innocent looking too. well, it's a LIE.



there i was, just innocently looking at the magnetic north website, minding my own buisness, marvelling at how scrolling reveals patterns on the page and the nice light box page layout style used which reminds me of oh so happy times hiding in darkrooms, when i started clicking around.

than all hell broke loose.
it's nice in a "what the hell is going on what is that oh did i break it" kind of way.
it uses all kinds of flash trickery beyond my knowledge or understanding, you click the flowery buttons and everything turns and spins and then more buttons appear or little graphics or pencils or giant mouse cursors, with weird talking and clunking going on in the background.





it made me go "squeee". i like how there is all this mayhem underlying the nice presentable site, and how it's all unleashed with an unknowing click.

choco leibniz

= freakin' awesome.

i've lost the ability to speak, everything keeps going whoooshy and my throat insists on causing me great pain (which is extremely unfair as i don't even have tonsils... i haven't had them since i was nine and only now is it starting to freak me out a little) but i have orange lucozade on tap and gosh darn it i'm going to do some work today.

not much probably, but some will do.

i've had a little idea... my main problem with designing a site that i'm happy with is that i tend to get bored of the design while i'm making it, or just about when i've finished it. but i've discovered a little CSS trick which lets you use several possible CSS templates on one page... i've seen it on a little webcomic i read called little gamers. if you look in the linky section there's a set of buttons which allow the user to pick from several templates. they've only used it to change the background of the site but i think it's really rather clever and could be put to more use.

i also read how to do it in these nice new shiny books i got.



YAY BOOKS.

this means i can set up the basic site, with the pages and files where i want them, and then when i get bored of a layout i can just add a new one. a the moment i'm just thinking of a simple idea where you can invert the colours on the page by choosing a different layout.

thinking things through

thinking about what i want to put on my site and where i want to put it, will hopefully make designing it that little bit easier.

also...

not that it will really be that noticeable since there was never anything there, but eternallymissed.org is down for the time being, as i'm moving hosts. the internet at this here student house is positively shat, and i can't even upload files with good old fashioned FTP, so i had to find a host that had cpanel.

hopefully this will actually inspire me to actually make a site.

i've gone with asmallorange.com, i don't know if they're any good yet, but with a name like that they must be.

tiny little oranges are going to host my website for me. that's so nice.

website-ness.

i've been in a right making things mood today.

i've started working on mine and lukes website again, working on my side of it...

here's what i'm currently thinking is going to be my main page:

and contact page:


the idea for the site is that they're our sketchbooks kinda thing. so i'm making my layouts in real life in a sketchbook, as i want mine bit to have texture and not look like i've done it all in dreamweaver. the plan is to nick a digital SLR and take nice photos of the pages when they're all finished, then put the layers for text and thumbnails on top... and maybe add more elements to the backgrounds on pooter.

and now i'm going to stop playing with my glue gun. and PVA. it's not just any PVA, it's art attack, neil buchanan endorsed PVA.

art attack rules!! YEAH.

live brief evaluation (or i'll be glad when this is over)

The main thing that I think of when I think of this brief is having far too many ideas and things to learn and nowhere near enough time to carry it all out. I really wanted to try to stretch the brief as far as I could, to really take my web skills further and see what else I could do instead of just a nice layout and working links.

My first ideas were very much wanting to show the mix of the real and virtual in my life, and not really concentrating on the everyday boring routines but looking at the traces left by my scurrying around the place and the weird things in my head, which naturally affect my perception of the outside world. I was also interested in the idea of leaving traces on web pages, which found it's way out in my new addiction to twitter, which I started using as a tool to track my thoughts about just about anything and also my ideas and research for the project.

I also started using myspace and facebook more as it was suddenly classifiable as work since it was an example of “web 2.0”, although I didn’t end up using them in my project at all.

The final product is something like my original idea but not. It’s a lot simpler than I had originally planned, my original idea was to have lots of random pages and having them all interlinked, almost a representation of my mind or memory. The final product is still pretty random, I tried to keep the text to a minimum apart from the pop ups, I wasn’t about to explain myself or anything on there, I wanted it to be confusing.
Some of my ideas such as the singing kokeshi and myspace feeds had to be abandoned as I was running out of time and it was making everything far too complex. I had to simplify my ideas into something I could actually make instead of something that I couldn’t get to work.


I think in the second year of this course I will definitely be doing interactive design, as much as I like motion graphics and am starting to like video I’m starting to become obsessed with the possibilities of interactive design. After looking into the twitter API and getting an idea of how web 2.0 works and how different sites can be mashed up together and used as well as looking into the work of Brendan Dawes and John Maeda which focuses on the more experimental uses of digital media. At the start of the year I was still interested in web design but wanting to see if I would be good at anything else, and after messing around in other areas for a bit I’ve found that I’m more obsessed with web design than ever, as everything else I’ve enjoyed this year can easily be brought into web design, which is something I tried to do by using video and second life in my website as well.

personal development brief thing

i've decided to do the "design a website which creatively demonstates a typical day in your life" brief as i'm really itching to do lots of web design type stuff again. i've been trying to get my fix in my spare time with my personal site when i can be bothered to sit infront of my screen and not log onto second life, but i'm really wanting to experiment a bit more, and need a bit of incentive.

i want to take this oppurtunity to make myself learn more code, probably something along the lines of XML or a java based script like processing (program used by brendan dawes, from magnetic north and that bloke that did that book "analog in, digital out" which you should go and buy.) i also find his abuse of FTP and PHP (which is in the book but i can't find in on the site) and amazing interactive snow globes interesting. and since it's supposed to be about a day in my life i want to experiment with what kinds of information i can put in to my site through different inputs.

i also want to see how i can possibly combine / make something nice to look at and maybe click from all my different sites / presences. try to possibly make something as ugly as a myspace page into something nice. maybe make records of what i'm doing when on different sites to make pretty things.