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The 1066 Process

When deciding what to do for my final project at Art Center I went over some things that I thought were important to me, because is a good possibility this is the last project I will create for myself for a long time.

I never thought of myself as a history buff, just someone who was curious where stuff came from. To me history is like writing in a car you didn’t choose with everybody else in the planet and everyone has an opinion on how was made. I decided on the battle of Hastings because it has the sensibility and the ambiguity that’s grade for getting people interested in the subject that they’re used to being force-fed.

This week it occurred to me that I am not so much trying to make a book about history, as a book about people’s reaction to it.

Beer Bottle

Decca project beer bottle

Interviews and Persona

During my individual critique scripting class with Brian Boyl the emphasis of my project shifted from the overall exhibition catalogue to an innovative web slideshow player which could be used with the show’s catologue. Because of emphsis change I conducted two rounds of interviews. The first about the target demogrphic’s perchasing habits at art shows, the second from photographers and web designers about web slide shows.

Art Exhibition Merchandise Purchasing

Molly, I didn’t get her last name, is an enviromental design student at Art Center. She has a degree from Berkley in Fine Art.

Viirj Kan is another Art Center environmental design student.

Q: How often do you go to art galleries or museums?

Molly :  About once every two months. LACMA, MOCA, HAMMER larger public galleries.

Viirj Kan : Twice a month – Large public galleries, but also smaller private ones.

Q: What was the last item you purchased from a gallery or museum?

Molly: It was two years ago. An umbrella from the TATE Modern (London), about 26$ converted from the EP. She liked the museum and it was raining.

Viirj Kan: About a month ago from MOCA, a book about 1960′s conceptual art at 14$.

Q: What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a book.

Molly: 120$ on eBay for a first edition of When Art Meets Space.

Viirj Kan: 70$ for When Art Meets Space. “Students will spend mondy on books promoted in class… A lot of times I’ll see a book in a gift shop or book store that I really want, then go home and order it from Amazon”.

What web sites have you paid to subscribe to

Molly: A sheet music service and net flix.

Viirj Kan: Never paid for a subscription.

Web Slide Show Players

Molly Tierney: is a professional photographer in her early 20′s. She worked in a large photo studio for the last three years, but has just quit to start her own practice. She is biased in Altadina Californa. She graduated with an AA from Pasadina City College.

Craig Hickman: an art Professor at the University of Oregon. His media ranges from fine art photography to fine art arduino machines, his web presence needs to communicate that.

Brett Beynon: is an Art Center graphic design student who freelances on the side. He has another Bachelor’s degree, but in business. Sense his schedule is so packed ease and speed of customization his his primary concern in a slide show player.

Q: What slide show player do you currently have live on your site? What do you like about it, what are some frustrations you have.

Molly Tierney: Live Books. Likes that it’s easy to use, don’t need to know anything under the hood to set it up. Sense the LiveBooks service is a WYSIWYG designed around a slide player the player feels like part of the site, not something tacked on to it. Frustrations are limited size of photos, can’t go full screen or launch a light box or other iframe player. Thumbnail navigation is tedious. The mobile features are nice, but not intuitive enough. Even though the service has a good slide show, it’s not flexible as a web site design too.

http://www.mtierneyphotography.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=6&p=3&a=0&at=0

Craig Hickman: He currently uses Slide Show pro, but is switching to the square space light box player. For presentation Slide Show pro is perfect. Going under the hood to swap out icons is difficult but doable, other than that customization is straight forward. The frustration comes from flash. Currently SSP is a flash only application although the developer says they’re working on a HTML 5 version of it. Sense Craig wants to develop mobile applications having a web presence that can’t be viewed on the platform he works is unacceptable.

http://www.dryreading.com/pictures/complexnumbers/index.html

Full disclosure – I’m designing his Square Space site. Square Space is the best WYSIWYG out there. The player is better than Live Book’s and it can do text based pages fairly well. The slide show player is a light box with flexible size. The problem is the user has to click though a gallery page to get to the light box player. This is a problem when there’s only one picture in the gallery. So it requires users to click through a meaningless page, which is like standing up on a coffee table and shouting SOMEONE ELSE CODES FOR ME!!! There isn’t a way thumbnail navigate inside the player, but sense the player is always over a thumbnail gallery, and clicking outside an i frame is so natural to users this isn’t a problem, other than requiring that one thumbnail page.

http://benhickmandesign.squarespace.com/photography/eugene/

Brian: Light box is his preferred player. No frustrations from the user end, but going under the hood to customize it confusing and time consuming. This has led to him using the inferior default Dream Weaver slide show. Brian uses slide shows purely to show images so the only navigation system the player needs to have forward and backward.

http://www.audetwebdesign.com/demo_lightbox2.php

Persona

Pal Fresco

Is going to graduate from Junior college with an AA in graphic design focused in print, but he’s taking an interactive portfolio class. He doesn’t know a line of code, but wants to promote his web site layouts. He’s convinced the iPad is the future of portfolios and his class is focussed on html. He thinks templates that look like templates makes work look unprofessional. He doesn’t have enough money to go out and hire a developer, even a cheap one. He is willing to pay a fee for a player.

He needs:

3 catogories. 0 – 3 sub cats for each

Galleries have 1 – 45 pictures.

Dimensions of the pictures vary from actual size business cads to magazine spreads.

Wants to skin few things, drop in a logo but not have it feel like a template.

Sites he likes sites that surprise you, but you can actually easy to get around like :

http://www.coreyfishes.com/

http://www.carlosalonsobodas.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html

Prospective Client Task

From the home page navigate to a category

Look at two pictures in sequence,

Navigate to a picture in that gallery non sequentially.

Go to another gallery,

Get a direct link to a picture.

Concept Proposals for Interactive Design 2 Final

QR CODES IN THE US

Plenty of blogger pixels has been spilled explaining why QR codes have swept Japan only to die in Pacific on their way to the US. Now with virtually all cell phone sales in the US being camera phones and 17% of active cellphones being smart phones with a hard core web browser it’s hard to imagine why QR hasn’t hasn’t evolved to more than a novelty. The best theory I’ve heard is that in the US more phones have full keyboards so google queries can be more quickly entered. But tying in a google term to an advertising is taking a big risk. “Discount Blue Jeans” may have the client as the top result when the ad goes to press, but there’s not guarantee it will stay there. Also you have to pay an SEO professional, generating a QR code takes five minutes and anyone can do it.

I think the reason QR hasn’t caught on in the US is the way it’s been approached. They’ve always been shown with an attitude of “learn how to use this software so you can see more advertising”. The few uses of QR codes in the US have been what the ad is about, not an ad including a QR code as a connivence to the viewer. After doing some brief research I couldn’t find an graphic use of QR codes outside of advertising.

Good QR

Bad QR

The Exhibition

This project will integrate with my communication design 4 (trans media design) class project. In CD4 we’re creating and building a brand strategy for a graphic design exhibition. The goal of my exibition is to target college aged students and encourage them to be more active in the art culture of university. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s what I’ve been working on.

There are a few ways QR codes could enhance the exhibition experience for the user and profitable for the exhibitor. Including QR codes in the exhibition catalogue will save on printing cost and give reason for increasing investment in the website and interactive components.

Integrating QR codes with exhibition pieces gives the user the option of using their smartphone or iPad as virtual tour guide that can communicate with images and sound. The user can then reference what peices they enjoyed from the show without having to remember the piece and artist names.

Retail Space

Provide an instore display to bolster confodence in QR technology that is used in the exibition catalogue.

The QR codes in the exhibition will link to a an audio / video presentation, but also to the online book store.

Archive

An archive of all the material related to the QR’ed piece.

A system of QR request info organized for the National Association of Museums.

Way-finding

A map of places around the city which have professional design work. At the location there are QR codes, once scanned in the user can see the designer’s process and rationalization behind the work.

Inside the exhibition the QR codes communicate with the 3rd screen to show how to get to related pieces.

Week 14 – it’s finished

Here’s the link

http://www.everythingaboutweb.com/artcenterdev/hickman_final/final_web/

Note – please look at it on Safari. There were more technical complications and after a point I had to sacrifice some browser compatibility. I will never again count on horizontal and vertical spacing.

There were lots of little quirks building this. There were also a lot of work arounds, but let me tell you a few so I don’t forget to ask how to resolve them.

For the lv 1 nav on levels 2 and 3 I tried putting relative divs floated and margined in side of a relative div, this didn’t work because the divs wouldn’t align three across, one wold always drop down.

I couldn’t figure out how to get the a:hover property to work.

When slicing .gifs in  fireworks it the program couldn’t detect the background color accurately. I had to set the mat color manually, which wasn’t an issue, but if the background was anything other than solid white there would have been a major problem, at least using .gifs.

Positioning an ap div inside of a relative div that isn’t removed from normal document flow, so that when the browser window is resized the window doesn’t move.

Other than that the cross browser issues came fro I think horizontal and vertical spacing issues. I think if I caught this problem early on and had more time I could have trouble shot it.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the site.

-Ben

Week 13, Finally the Design Is Finalized

Comments from the week 12 crit were

• color palate needs to be expanded
• A new header graphic, no gradient
• Bot the nav and the sub nav must be visible on all pages

In previous design revisions I started with the home page and moved deeper into the page. But because the sub nav isn’t visible on the home page, I had trouble laying out a design and then working in the sub nav later. This time I started with the lv 3 page. Here’s the initial work this week.

I emailed Jamie the design and for the first time I got away without out a color note. Her comments were

• Reorder and spell check sub menue items.
• Reduce size of footer button text.
• Remove that hand from the header because it looks religious.

At frist I didn’t see the religious hand thing, but then I showed it to some friends and they all agreed that it looked like a Jesus hand so I removed it and enlarged the logo.

Logo and Layout Revisions

Here’s a screen shot of homepage I uploaded onto the class server last week

In short the crit said good design direction, but the archive is distracting and the satellite site needs a logo. Since the logo might determine other design decisions I decided to design that first. I’ve been in classes where half the term was dedicated to designing a logo – InStyle Voice’s needed to be designed in a few hours so I went to the most efficient kind of logo – logo type from an existing type face. I wanted to see what kinds of fonts are popular in fashion ads.

Here’s some of that research.

Needless to say, no one is going to win a typographic award for doing these ads, but they let me know serif stuff is in. With that in mind I started the design process. I usually sketch a lot before I go to the computer, time is just more of an issue here so I had to take a few short cuts.

Needless to say, no one is going to win a typographic award for doing these ads, but they let me know serif stuff is in. With that in mind I started the design process. I usually sketch a lot before I go to the computer, time is just more of an issue here so I had to take a few short cuts.

Some of the other states are in the gallery above, be here’s the home page as it would look when it loads.

Mid Term Revisions and Style Development

From the mid term crit feed back about what works in the mock up was

• Concept of limeting choices
• List of suggested articles
• Overall wire frame

Suggested revisions from the mid term crit were:

• The section title and bread curbing information is in a confusing spot. Raise this element in the hierarchy.
• The article listing should be above the fold and on all pages, including the home page. Do this by reducing the size of the featured category pictures
• Lack of unique style

Suggested additions to the site

• sample cases – could be a level 2 item for every section.
• pricing information – something that could be addressed in a bullet point when the information is in the article.

Style Research

Initially I wanted to keep in accordance with the minimalist theme and have only black on white with some of the In Style colors on top then use imaged Univer type for section titles to give it a French bistro feeling. This did work, although the light condensed Univer does look nice on a site.

Color Palate

Something that says fun wedding, but won’t detract from the user’s confidence. This means staying away from heavily gendered schemes and having an awareness of current trends. I researched wedding trends on Style Site, then made color palates from them on at kuler.adobe.com

The major trends in bridal campaigns are analogous color and tones of natural light. The only exception to this was a campaign I found from Justin Alexsand which was a new take on the fairytale wedding that was high contrast and saturated.

Midterm AP Div Structure

Last weeks design crit helped me clarify the fewer choice idea. The most improvement came in clarifying the level 3 navigation.

I assembled my template in Fireworks. The potential of assembling a live interactive mock up in Fireworks only without going into Dreamweaver is there, but I used AP divs for this exercise. But it feels a little like taking a step forward and taking a step back just using AP divs.