Posts filed under 'Design'
Working for a digital agency as a developer is great, it really is. I do miss stretching my design muscles though, and I do want to get to grips with javascript better, so I’ve set myself the task of creating a new portfolio website. What I want most of all is for all of the information I want to display to be immediate, but I want to try and present it will enough to not need the feeling of ‘web pages’ and navigation. After all, all that a porfolio site should have is your work, a bit of information about yourself (including any twitter/whatever feeds that are relevant) and a link to your CV. Everything needs to feel categorised and exactly in it’s right place… I’m tempted to use Drupal, which is my current favourite toy, but I don’t need anything especially complicated and I’ve got enough Drupal projects going on at work…
Well with any luck now I’ve made a blog post about it I’ll start setting myself real deadlines and get this show on the road!
February 21st, 2010
I know people are all about numbered lists with bite sized information chunks now, but I don’t seem to be able to order my thoughts enough to do it, but here is a quick summary:
Whereas previously the weather was viewable the instant you got to the page, you now have to search and then scroll down on a laptop or smaller screen to be able to see what the weather predictions are.
Ok, now why :
1. Over complicated with less crucial information and more useless information. Also, the layout just sucks. What were they thinking!
I don’t want to have to scan the page to work out what I’m trying to do, and the fact that they’ve had to put instructions right in the front goes to show exactly how bad the design is. Good design, the kind you would expect from a corp like the BBC guides you with visual cues rather than with a list of points on how to use the site. I don’t care that they’ve got a ‘don’t show me this again’ tickbox - this isn’t the kind of site you go to to interact with, this is the kind of site you go to to find out whether you need a bloody umbrella today. This is the kind of website I check on friends computers before going out, that I check on peoples phones or at an internet cafe or on wifi or whatever, I don’t want to be prompted each time.
I don’t care about forecast maps and videos or related links but they seem to be taking up an awful lot of page space. I care about the five day forecast (which is now a four day forecast) and the 24 hour forecast (which is also just four icons). Was the issue that it wasn’t very accurate or something? It was too difficult to try and predict something in that much detail? Can’t be because they have the maps showing forecast times in a much more fine-grained slider.
Why is the ‘recently viewed’ thing hidden so far down?
Why are the weather icons on the 4 day forecast and the 24 hour forecast highlighted every other time in pink? It suggests that there’s something significant about those days, why didn’t they just use a plain divider if they wanted extra visual separation?
Why is the navigation on the left hand side when it means it sacrifices so much more page space? I really liked the system they had before, they could have just expanded that by adding extra tabs for the forecast maps (which i guess are pretty useful) and whatever all the rest of the junk on the page is that’s cluttering it up and making it look so verbose.
Why haven’t they given more prominence to the search box? If they’re making people search for the weather now instead of just displaying it like they used to they might as well at least make it easy to spot and use, like google did or any other site where the first thing you do when you get to the page is to search. Admittedly the convenience of having London’s weather on the main page might only apply to people who live in London, leaving the others had to search for it anyway, but it makes sense to have the capital city the default thing to show, rather than sweet fa).
It’s perfectly possible to have a site with loads of cool useful techy content and make it easy to use and visually clear. Why haven’t they done it, why!?
2. Sucky icon design
The other icons might have been a tad ugly, but there was no mistaking at a glance that they meant cloudy or rainy or whatever. For me and for a lot of others this site is not about visual aesthetics but about utilitarianism.
Anyway in conclusion I’m really annoyed about the whole thing and I don’t understand why most people seem to like it. If you’ve found my ranty post with it’s poorly set out points and you disagree, please get in touch and let me know why I’m wrong.
February 28th, 2009
Note to remind myself that in the end what seems to work best is for IE6 to use a gif and set the div’s opacity, and in the rest just use a png. The AlphaImageLoader doesn’t let you position backgrounds so there’s no point trying to cram it all in. Fixed width stuff too, but doesn’t really matter if there are only 2 dropdowns.
February 4th, 2009
Actually after trying to think up that title I feel too drained to actually type anything.
December 15th, 2008
I am currently working for a company called 33above in london near liverpool street as a sort of general all purpose designer. I’ve been mocking up screenshots of a skin for their cms (which would be used by clients as well as themselves) and writing an xsl-fo parser in actionscript 3. It’s been very exciting. I’m also going to Costa Rica in a few weeks till December in a mad rush to avoid growing up and getting a permanent job - also to teach english as a foreign language and learn to surf and speak spanish.
Oh, and I miss living with my friends. <3 8 Church Close! The new soul calibur is pretty good though.
August 14th, 2008
Quick note to remind myself I was exhibiting at these two shows recently and I should really get a move on finishing my portfolio.
July 14th, 2008
I wonder why it seems so much easier to write straight into an html file without wordwrap than to write a proper word document? I think it has something to do with being forced to be recursive and re-read everything written, as well as essentially having two seperate views of what you are writing - the stylised version and the plain words surrounded by markup. A close up view of a sentence followed by a quick ctrl+s and a refresh of the stylised page with a view of it in context seems to make me concentrate much more on what I’m writing, for some reason.
March 8th, 2008
I finished this yesterday. Got distracted midway by Resi 4, and then by 6 Robin Hobb 800+ page books. But wow though, this game is so good. Level design was superb, dialogue was excellent, and I loved the grace of the movement and animation so so much.
As well as that, it was a very pretty game:
Weirdly enough I really loved the voice acting too. I can count on one hand the games where I’ve thought the voice acting was done well and suited the characters. They got it spot on with Prince of Persia though, and the music through the game was great as well.
They got the difficulty level right too. Just enough so your stomach drops with dread when you see the latest fiendish timed trap sequence, and your heart lifts just as high when you manage to complete it, but not so much that you are still trying to get through it half an hour later, growling in frustration. Everything is really tightly done, and it’s the kind of thing where you can see the designers and coders and testers have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into making everything exactly right.
In fact one sentence can summarise just how immersive this game is : When the Prince is climbing up the torture chamber, jumping from beam to beam, occasionally overbalancing with bats flying out at him and no sand left, I actually experienced vertigo.
August 20th, 2007
The movement of the Prince is fluid and effortless - the first few battles I was just constantly jumping and backflipping over people and then spinning round to knife them, just because it was so much fun to watch. Getting through to slightly harder battles and it’s even more enjoyable, trying to think tactically about it. Oh, and being able to slow/turn back time is pretty damn cool as well.
I love the way it’s being told as a story, it gives a totally new take on checkpoints and dying (”No, no, that’s not what happened. I didn’t fall there. Let me start again.”), and so far the plot is pretty interesting as well.
I remember when my brother and I found the very first prince of persia on an old floppy, and oh how we struggled to get even past the dungeon levels. Back then I was really impressed by Prince’s movement as well, it seems to be their trademark to make the character animation beautiful.
It feels pretty weird going back to being restrained by a normal controller though, instead of the freedom of the wii remote but it’s worth it. Can’t wait for Resident Evil 4, which is released in a few days time, but chances are I’ll play it briefly and then go back to Prince of Persia.
Edit 04 July : Boy was I wrong, Resi Evil has me hooked. Bit of a scary game though…
June 25th, 2007
Okay, so I’ve finished crime and punishment. I didn’t put the book down feeling as stunned as I’ve felt before about some books. I keep thinking about it though, and Raskolnikov’s character has stayed with me and poked at my brain and made me think and see things from other people’s perspective… I never thought I could empathise with a murderer. I don’t think I’ve never read anything as adept at manipulating the reader’s emotions and thoughts. I’ve given it 5 stars in my catalogue though, right up there with Anna Karenin and The Tiger who came to Tea (what a classic).
I’ve made the mistake of reading an in depth analysis of the novel though, and you’ll be pleased (or disappointed) to know nothing’s changed - I still don’t like it when people try to tell me what the author meant/was thinking about when he/she wrote such and such. I still think that the deeper analysis and thoughts behind novels, art, music, whatever, should come naturally, as you reflect on it over the few days after you’ve experienced it. I hated it when it was forced on me in English lit at school; it pretty much ruined Macbeth for me. I didn’t care what the underlying meaning was in such beautiful prose, all I wanted to do was enjoy it uninterrupted by teacher “explaining” it to us. But I guess…:
“We don’t know what Shakespeare meant. Or what he wanted us to learn. Or if any of the Cool Shit that modern scholars find in his work is in there because the historically-extant Shakespeare deliberately put it in. But that doesn’t mean the Cool Shit isn’t there (the other mistake students commonly make).”
January 25th, 2007
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