Principal of design

We are starting the web design unit in CyberARTS, we we're taught the 10 principles to making a good website.

1. Don't make users think
2. Don't squander the user's patience
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a visible language
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

This is an example of a BAD website design





Principles of design missing:

1. Don't make users think
2. Don't squander the user's patience
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a visible language
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often
Pretty much, all of them.

There may even be more, the main point is this web design doesn’t work because it's sloppy. Image files are broken and missing and even some images are overlapping. They are over using the animated icons, which is making it crowded. The background color is hard to look at and is distracting, making you want to leave it. With the pictures that do work there too big and with all of these things happening you can't concentrate on the words.







Now, this would be a better more simple and enjoyable website

Principals of design used:

1. Don't make users think
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a visible language
10. Test early, test often


This website design demonstrates clean colours, lot's of white space and a bright look giving it a light and inviting feeling. Each new section of writing has big font that tells you what it's about instead of it being one long page of words. The images and font used are clean and simple which means it's readable.

Rio

This weekend has been so rainy, depressing and boring. On a rainy day, what’s the best thing to do? Watch movies! Today I went to the theater and saw Rio! It was such a sweet and fun movie! There were many beautiful parts of the movie that showed Rio de Janeiro, and the rainforest, and the beaches, and some stereotypical characters and situations. It was an adorable love story about a domestic blue macaw and a native macaw and how they are the only two left of their species! Together Blue and jewel have crazy adventures in Rio and meet new friends! The music was awesome! I really liked it, the music makes you feel anywhere from warm inside to you want to get up and dance! The movie takes place in Brazil, and the main character is from Minnesota. I love movies like these because anyone can watch it and really love it. This movie I would give it a nine out of ten, it's well worth seeing!

Hands

I find one of the hardest things to draw is hands because of all the different angles, poses and being able to hold things. Hands come in so many verities and shapes and sizes! Threes animal hands, human hands, holding hands, fists act. Anyway I was looking for a couple of how to draw hands guides and I liked this one because I can’t draw hands and I don’t know how to draw guns. Hopefully it's useful to you.

Gift from a friend

So recently I’ve been having issues with friends and family. Most days it really loud and I can't concentrate or even think properly. So When I got home I finished my homework, ate dinner and decided to go use the computer. My friend was on and started to talk with me and I told him I was interested in this game called Portal. Since Portal 2 just came out today I thought it would be a perfect subject. After a couple of minutes waiting for a response I got a pop up saying I received a gift! Best gift ever, right on the day portal 2 came out! I will play until my fingers grow numb. I know this isn’t my usual blog post but it made my day after all the negative things that have been happening recently in my life. Even a little good luck can sprout some happiness. Once again, thank you.

Skull

After about 2 - 3 weeks of working on it, it's finally complete! This assignment was to see how good we are at realistic drawings including the space, shading and over all finished product. Not only was this a test, but it shows how much our skills have grown from last year. Our teacher gave us options on how the scene was going to look. As a class we decided on the positioning of objects and see how they looked from different angels and if they looked good with the lighting. After a while of planning were the items were going to go we set up our working areas and found a good composition.

The first couple of days where my favorite, we needed to choose either three different compositions or just one composition but looked at it from different angles. For my three I choose a deer skull and some flowers, a man’s face and a bear skull and my final, the coyote skull with the jug.

I used a verity of different pencils anywhere from HB pencils to 6B pencils. The outline was enjoyable but I would have to say shading is the hard part. You need lots of patience and stillness to achieve high quality, it’s a tough road. I think my favorite part of the drawing is how the skulls front snout shadow glides along the jug. To me it looks very smooth and realistic.

All in all I think I have grown from last year. I'm pretty impressed with my work because the shadows work well with the placing. I enjoyed this assignment and are looking forward to more.

Tim Burton

So a couple of days ago me and my class went to the Tim burton exibit at this museum and it was awsome! I personally thought it was a bit too short but it was still great. I noticed how Tim had so much inspiration from other major artists like Vincent Van Gogh...... and uh others. I was so suprised but sorda like oh that makes sence because tim burton created the aliens for mars attack! any way, i'v wrote alot today so heres one of Tim Burtons first major stop motion movies, I think it's called "Vincent". well i'm going to go draw or walk to the park or somthing...Anyway Enjoy!!

More, More...MORE!

OK, ok ok.. i'll be honest i haven't been keeping up with my weekly posts, sorry! but i have been working my butt off in other classes! school is a hungering monster who always wants MORE. I't always wants a full course meal. I wait untill the day it decides to take a diet.

Typography: Beyond The Sea

VIDEO UPLOADING SOON!

This new assignment i completed was about typography. This project took about three weeks in total, we needed to choose quotes or any form of speech and then write words to match the timing there said and to be enjoyable to view. I chose the song Beyond The Sea.

so i went with a 1940's song called "Beyond the Sea" by Bobby Darin. I coulden't find any quotes because of all the choices.The medium I used were in applications, I used where Adobe Illistrator and Flash. this was my first time using Adobe Flash so it was difficult for me. Once i understood what keyframes where and how to use them it bacame a little less complicated.

For this song i chose a underwater background so I used dark shades of blue and added seaweed for the first bit. Once I got to the end I decided to make the words turn into a small white boat. I diden't know how to slow the boat down to make it bob around less but it still worked. I tried using font that gave a feel for the
1940's and used blue letters.

I like using the seaweed in the final cut because i got to use the bone tool to make the seaweed sway then just looped it. The boat was probably my favourite part because it took a bit of work to create it in illistrator then transfer it to flash. The womens silouette I still don't really understand though.

I chose to make it this way because this song was about sailing the sea then finding his woman standing on the sands waiting for him. I'v never been on a boat before and thought it would be cool to do somthing that hasen't been done. I chose this older song because it's diffrent instead of all the newer songs. I really like this song but i think i may be sick of it from hearing it so much now.

If i could change a couple of things it would be the boats sailing speed, it's way too fast. I would change the song to probably quotes from a television show or movie. If i was given more time i probably would have added more of the song to it.

I think the most difficult part was the sillouette of the women, the creating of the boat and making the keyframes match up perfectly with the words. The seaweed was a bit strange at first because the bone tool wasen't working then I needed to create another layer for the lines in the seaweed so I had to delete them. Since i'm still new to this I think i did a pretty good job and i really enjoyed this project.

I think the most sucsessfull part was in the beginning when you go under the water, the colours went darker and it diden't move too fast. It felt to me it was all added to the right timeing. I over all really liked the whole look of the piece and thought it was really good. This assignment was great and i finally learned how to use keyframes to make classic movements. I enjoyed this project and loved using flash.

what design am i happy with sucsessful?

Inked Birds

describe whch print you were most satisfied with, explain why:
I chose this because it diden't have any finger prints and the colours complimented each other (I thought).

What was the most difficult part of the assignment?:
the most difficult part of this assignment was the printing. I was afraid of smudging and once you printed more than three you could see paint coming through parts you diden't want it to. I didn't Enjoy the cleaning part though, haha it took so long to clean the ink off the boards and wash the tile and put away all the newsprint and paint, all in all about 10-20 minutes!

Describe what is strong about your design. Why is it a good design?
I honestly wanted to change my design because after looking at it, the print wasen't as big as the paper and made the print look cut off to early. My other idea was to make an owl.

Describe how you used the elements and principles of design in your prints:
I originally wanted it to be yellow and green but finishing it off I felt the green and red verison was better.we needed to carve 70% of the bird by the time we where done.

If you could change one thing about you artwork, what would it be and why?
If i could change one thing on my artwork it would be the sky.I would use diffrent colour paper instead of plain white, it would give the print a diffrent feel to it depending on the colour of paper.

Over all i enjoyed this assighnment and and i am looking forward to our next ones!

Typography: Isolation

So my tech Arts class was working on typography and talked a lot about the font type helvetica. I personally like the font, most likely because i'm still new to this world. So we were all assigned to choose a "exotic" word and give it emotion from the font, spacing and designs and such. I chose Isolation, it seems like a very dark and sad word so i chose it instead of something happy. I felt this project required a bit of hard thinking and a look at what you can do to give things emotion with out a face to express it. (click on Image to enlarge, if interested)

So this took about two days to complete. I didn't want to over do this word because it means alone and disliked, i also didn't want to make it too simple so i wanted appropriate unity. With this project we needed to go threw tons of different fonts, i tried out at least 20. So i found a font that looked like it was breaking, even dying slowly. Then i found a dark design to add to give a bit of space taken up so it wasn't too plain. I'm looking forward to future assignments and hope i find a field ill be better at. I will keep you up to date with my weekly blog posts.

Chinese Traditional Ink Painting

This was our first visual arts assignment. This is eastern traditional style chinese painting. This was my first time trying it so i didn't mean any disrespect. I enjoyed trying this new style of painting. We used three traditional brushes made with the from a goats fur, Chinese rice paper and black ink.


We tried to stay as traditional and eastern styled as possible because they tend to use a lot of open space to provide room for the energy to flow creating a positive mood. I learned if we blocked in any space it would be like keeping that energy upset and captive, which we don't want. We created three different types of paintings. We created bamboo, cherry blossoms and orchids. As we are beginners at this we didn't do any animals or scenes, honestly i think it may have been too complicated.

I think my favorite type of painting was the orchids flowers because they were so pretty and fun to use with the brush stroke. it felt very light and calming while creating them. We needed to hold our brush a certain way as well. it's sort of hard to explain but we needed to hold it perfectly upright and straight so that the strokes would not be bulky and heavy, rather light and flowing. I thought this assignment was very fun but you can't rest your arm on the table which was difficult for me since i always draw/paint in a western style.

Meanings and Thoughts

Our class just Finished a movie called "Helvetica" and it was about what helvetica (the font type) does and how much of a impact it has on our world. Our post this week is what we think (at least 2) quotes mean.

Wim Crouwel
“You’re always a child of your time … you can’t escape it"

I think this means threw everyones life time theres always a generation you have grown up with. I think he means the people of this generation all have similar ideas based on what the know and learn from eachother. For example after WW2 alot of people of that generation were sick of the caotic, crazy and messy font so everyone wanted somthing readable, calm and most important, nutral. Thats why most people of that age (and even now) made and used helvetica beacuse of its nutral perfection.


Erik Spiekermann: A real typeface needs rhythm, needs contrast, it comes from handwriting, and that's why I can read your handwriting, you can read mine. And I'm sure our handwriting is miles away from Helvetica or anything that would be considered legible, but we can read it, because there's a rhythm to it, there's a contrast to it. Helvetica hasn't got *any* of that.

I think he has a huge point and great taste! I think what he means is helvetica is not human. Its "perfect". In our world no two people look exactly the same. He's saying helvetica is like a robot and everything in the font is straight and has no feeling to it. I think he wants difrences, being able to walk down the street and seeing a bunch of diffrent fonts instead of a entire street with almost every stores writing in helvetica. making loopy, ziggy, curvy and diffrent lines is what gives us our colours. We use diffrent clothing and colours to express our feelings, to show eachother our personalities, what makes us human.

Flying high with......birds

This Made me laugh, a combined picture of our last sketching assignment and our upcoming one!

Ok so our new unit in visual arts is........BIRDS!!!! Yes birds. They fly, they sing and their being printed on paper with our new unit. This unit involves Lino art(printmaking). This was a popular method of art for Picasso. I think this will be a difficult one to do because it confusing to me and im not great at drawing birds let alone carving them. I enjoy learning these new methods as long as i get a bit of help along the way. I was going to choose a bird with long legs or a type of head dress. The colours i'm going to choose are green and red on blue or yellow paper. I have only done print making once before in eighth grade. We needed to creat a winter scene. This method was easy because we only used one type of ink instead of two. I am up to the chalange and hope i will understand it better in the upcomming days.

Bounce, Bounce, Bounce

Tips and Tricks

This my first weekly blog post. Since we are currently creating flash in our class i decided to show a tutorial about how to make a bouncing ball. This is supposed to be the easy part of flash, its my first time doing it so i find it very difficult. I was so suprized seeing most of my other classmate already knew how to do it. Only about three or four kids including me diden't know about it. Well at first i was excited to do flash now, im just upset at how complicated it is. I was really looking forward to making somthing amazing. It won't get too far with only about a week to do it. I would buy the program but if i did i wouldent have any help at home so it woulden't work. I try my best and always ask for help but i try not to notice that almost every minute i need it.....hehe. So heres a a small video on how to do a tween! Hopfully, if you start or already do flash this can help. enjoy.

A Warm Welcome

Ah yes, this time of the year has come again! The time of the year when i finally get to do visual and Cyber arts! this year will be more challenging than the previous year, i'm looking forward to all the things i've heard about it. For starters in visual arts we are going to learn about traditional Chinese painting and with me tech art we are learning flash animation. I've always wanted to learn flash! So i'm back in action and looking forward to this New Year, Lily Lulu signing on!