Major Assignment #3 - Finishing Touches

With everything out of the way, all that was left was to decide whether it was enough. Whether or not it needed anything, or if I needed to get rid of anything. In the end, all I decided to do was add text that was sort of like a title for the website. Although Gianni asked me to not use text for the main part of the website, I felt it was necessary to put a title in.



With that done, I feel as though I have completed the website. It sort of finishes it properly.

Major Assignment #3 - Links

With the end of the website nearing, I decided to add image links to represent the emotion I was conveying. The emotions I used were: Love, Peace and Sadness. With these emotions I picked very stereotypical images relating to these emotions:
- love = red heart
- peace = cherry blossom
- sadness = dead tree branch, and also (a link to my blog using the Blogger logo)

I placed them in their spaces not for any particular reason but to hide as little of the Flash animation as possible.

Major Assignment #3 - Images

More images...

Sadness

Major Assignment #3 - Images

More Images...

Peace

Major Assignment #3 - Images

This post is dedicated to the pictures I used for the slide show for each emotion. All the images I got were from stock.xchng, a royalty-free stock photography website (none of the photographs were taken by me).

Love







With these images were used to create a simple slide show movie for each emotion.

note: the rest of the pictures are in different posts, due to the image size limit for each post

Major Assignment Concept #3 - Aesthetics

At the moment the webpage seems really plain. There's not much there to be honest. Hence, I added a few things to be background, plus put up the links I intend to be using. For the background, I used a coding program to generate abstract designs using the curves similar to my main idea. Every time the program is run, the result is different. After running it a few times, I got one that I liked it.



I used different parts of it to frame the lower half of the webpage, and made them move a bit for visual appeal. After getting this working, I moved on to the links I intended to be using. My original idea was to use buttons that represented the emotion I was conveying. I still think this is a good idea, so I do plan to do it. With that being said, I put up a link to this blog.

Major Assignment Concept #3 - Introduction

After having getting my masking working properly, I decided to move on to the next thing - the introduction to the webpage. For this, I needed an image of a person with a big heart (representing me). I found a picture of a toilet sign man through Google, put it into Adobe Illustrator and "pen tooled" my own man. I did the same thing for the heart as well.



The next part was getting it to do what I wanted it to do - transforming the man after I click the heart, which then takes me to the masking part. Ultimately all of these things put together equals the introduction for the webpage. I had a lot of trouble with the Actionscript and making everything link together. However, with the assistance of a university friend (thanks Gordy!) I was able to get everything going. Basically my problem was putting the actionscript on the wrong place, ie if its for buttons, then put it on the buttons.

Major Assignment Concept #3 - Masking

I have started work on the Flash, mainly playing around/experimenting with masking to see what effects I could get. Basically what I did was use white rectangles to cover my background image. I then moved them sequentially to reveal the image, making it look like it was growing.



Although I could visualise the idea and I could see what I needed to do, I still had trouble creating it. I found myself back tracking a fair bit just to clean things up and make them work. In the end I spent a fair bit on this section not because it was difficult, but because I was unfamiliar with Flash and did lots of silly mistakes.

Major Assignment Concept #3 (Complete Remake)

After viewing work from the previous semester, and taking into consideration Gianni's comments for my previous concept(s) I have decided to completely start over. Having a greater understanding on what I was supposed to do, I did a really quick brainstorm on different ways I could convey space.

The most interesting idea that came to mind was emotion and space, ie. how physical spaces affect our feelings/emotions. I had a few rough ideas about what I wanted, but decided to roll them all together to create a "super idea" haha.

I will post again with my storyboard and a sketch I drew of the idea. At the moment though, I feel like I'm heading in the right direction.

Major Assignment Research (cont.)

Today, I decided to type up the research I've done in previous weeks. Again, I randomly searched for websites to analyse structurally.

Website #3 - Hypnoteis
Another website that showcases digital work. No real artistic elements, just a plain website with a small banner on the top and thumbnails linked to the work. The thumbnails are a very good size in my opinion. I can clearly see the images in thumbnail form, so I don't make a mistake of clicking something I don't want. Navigation-wise, the website is very good. No scrolling is required and there aren't too many links on the page.

What To Take/What Not To Take - The navigation system is perfect. However it lacks in visual appeal. I intend to use this navigation system as a basis for my own, yet 'dress it up' for it to be more visually pleasing.

Website #4 - Austin Shaw
This is the online portfolio for Austin Shaw, another website for displaying work. This is better artistically than the previous website, however there are some things that aren't as good. Firstly, the website contains lots of little thumbnails that are linked to his work. I believe his reason for making it so small is because he simply has so much work to showcase. However, because of the large volume of work it is impossible to clearly see the thumbnails clearly.

What To Take/What Not To Take - the visual appeal is very nice. However the navigation system is a bit flawed in what it's supposed to do.