Web 2.0

So I looked up "Web 2.0 websites" and found a large list of them at AjaxProjects Web2. I clicked around and found a Web 2.0 website called Endeve. It is a business selling an electronic invoicing program for businesses both large and small. It is obvious that the graphics where designed/made in Illustrator. It is very clean and simple. It has lots of gradients, textured backgrounds, and hints of three dimensionality in the buttons, with the illusion of rounded highlights. The graphics also give the illusion of transparency through use of color changes and gradients. It is very clean and professional looking. I hope I can do something like that in the future.

"Art Gallery"

So i went to the "art gallery" downstairs. The one on the ground floor. My thoughts are ....meh. As an art Gallery, its not very good . As a showcase for student work and their involvement in the community, its great. I just feel like calling it an art gallery is trying to make it into something its not. When I went to UH, there was an art gallery on campus. It was also small, but at least larger than the space here. In addition to showing student/faculty work, it also showed artists (mid career, not fresh from school, but still alive and creating work) and artist collectives. The gallery actually had curators (I was an intern for one of the curators there)and created exhibition catalogs  for each show they held. While most of the "gallery" in AIW was professionally done, it seems a little strange that some parts of it were put up with pushpins. Really? pushpins? Ugh. Anyways, I'm just not sold on it being a "art gallery". The work was great, and it showcases the student's and their involvement in the community very well. It's just not an "art gallery".

web design - circles

I am wondering if there is a way to arrange the information on a page using the circular shape and have it be still legible and easy to navigate as most normal websites are. We have been learning about the grid, and while I understand that concept and that its important to use it in order to organize information, I just wonder if we could use a circular system and still achieve the same results. Since the computer screen and the window on the screen acts as a framing device for the website this is probably part of why rectangular and square shapes work well in website design. But in my graphic design classes at UH, I also learned that it is sometimes interesting to break the rectangular framing device with circles. I think it would certainly be eye catching, but I'm not sure if i could organize it well enough for the audience to understand it and for it to be intuitive. I have tried looking for some examples of using circles to organize information on the web but haven't really come up with anything. If you know of any examples, please let me know.

Trends

So I was looking around for a site to talk about and after finding many sites that seem to either fall into either geometric or possibly corporate, I finally found one that I -think- is organic. The site is Rocket Dog, a shoe company. There are several reasons that cause me to think the site is organic. For one, it uses an earthy color scheme, using mostly light browns with a robin's egg/sky blue for visual contrast. The texture in the visuals is slightly organic too, reminiscent of the texture of rough rocks or tree bark. The picture in the background is asymmetrical, with the woman only being on the left side of the screen. In the side scrolling main cell, the visual designs often blend together, overlap, or seem to peek into the cell frame slightly, giving a sense of fluidity and asymmetry. the structure of the site is still very blocky, and the text used is an often chunky san serif , which while not terribly organic, is probably used to help keep the site looking clean and professional, as well as easy to read. (PS, is this a long enough blog post, ro should it be longer?)

Trends

In class today, we talked about several different trends with regards to web design. They were: Organic, Geometric, and Grunge. For Organic trend, I chose the example of Traders Joe's website because it has a light brown color background fitting with a "earthy" color palette of Organic, as well as images of birds and leaves, and it was not as rigid as other websites. Some of the images leak out of their boxes, and the site is not perfectly symmetrical. For Geometric trends, I feel that the Blaffer Art museum's website is a good example. It uses geometric shapes, such as circles and rectangles, as well as thick bands of color to help give a very orderly, clean, and rigid feel. As for Grunge trend, sites like Spencer's are an example of the graffiti and dirty look often associated with that trend.

The trend I am going to talk in depth today is Organic. Organic is usually associated with earth tone colors, greens, browns, sometimes yellow and blue. It is normally flowing, or asymmetrical keeping in the theme of living, growing things (mostly plants). Most of the time it depicts objects or animals found in nature, like plants, leaves, flowers, birds, various animals, etc. It is appropriate for use with some businesses and non profits, but not with others. Businesses and non-profits that deal with nature, food, and environmental affairs will get good use out of this trend, whereas businesses and non-profits dealing mainly with commerce, technology, urban life, etc , will not find this trend useful.