Website color-shading technique

I’m interested in understanding what it is that makes websites look good or professional (graphically).  One thing I’ve noticed that seems to help is related to the way the website uses different shades of the same color.  By weaving onto a page different shades of even a single color, the page can achieve an appearance of both unity and variety, which seems to be essential to the professional look.

The MSN.com homepage is a good example.  The vast majority of color on the page is blue (except white of course).  But the text is a dark blue, the header backgrounds are a light blue, and the MSN title picture and page background are a gradient the lies between the two.  And so I see overall theme on the page, but without that cheap effect that is produced when only one shade is used throughout.

I am trying to incorporate this technique into my personal web-page.

More on Fireworks

I’ve spent more time with Fireworks now and so am a little more qualified to evaluate its usefulness to me.  It still seems like a very useful tool for web-design, especially when used in combination with PNG files.  Because Fireworks works with vectoring so well (at least, as far as I can tell), I can use it to make quick work of a lot web-design, such as in putting smooth corners inside div tags and in creating quick backgrounds/watermarks.  I can put Fireworks on one monitor and Dreamweaver on another and adjust images on my pages in real-time.

The vectoring tool is pretty cool.  It’s really useful for making illustrations to add to text.

My only serious gripe is related to the layers tab.  I like to work with layers, but it seems that whenever I drag the layers/objects around inside that little box that they never end up where I want them too.  That can be annoying.

Also, it would seem like Fireworks could make it easier to connect points on different vector objects (not group, but connect — like attaching a curvy-line to a corner of a rectangle).  But perhaps I just haven’t become used to it yet.  Or maybe it has something to do with the way PNG files handle vector data.

Of course, I imagine that Fireworks falls short in the bitmap-editing department.  But most of that kind of work is outside of my league anyway.

I’m not sure I’d pay $300 dollars for it, though.  I’d have to see if there are any $100 programs that do the same sort of thing.

Scenerios from class concerning copyright issues.

Scenerios given in class:

Incidental Use

I’m making a very small-budget film on ballet in New York City as part of a graduate film class. I hope to get the film shown on PBS… it will never be shown in theatres. In one scene I am filming students talking on steps outside the school and a cell phone rings, playing the melody from a pop song. I am told I will have to edit that ring-tone out if I want to get the film legally cleared for distribution… or I can pay a $25,000 one-time fee.

Comment: Seems unreasonable, as the recording was clearly unintentional, and not contributing anything to the value of recording.

Incidental Use II

During a scene in that same film I interview a ballet dancer. In the background, tiny and inaudible, you can see an episode of the Simpsons playing on a TV. The lawyers clearing the film for distribution flag this as a problem. Matt Groening, who created the Simpsons, says “No problem, you can use it!” Fox says “I don’t think so” and demands a $100,000 fee.

Again, this seems unreasonable. A TV set playing a TV episode in the background is as natural as seeing a coffee table or a rug in a background.

Lost Copyright

A famous educational film on Civil Rights uses a lot of archival and news footage for which their original use agreement has expired. Many of the copyright holders cannot be found at all, others are companies that no longer exist or people who are dead and whose estate status is unknown… so the film series, a staple in classrooms and on public television, cannot be shown or distributed any longer.

It would seem like there should be some kind of paperwork/process that the film’s advocates could go through to indicate that they had made every reasonable effort to search for the copyright holders, so as to secure legal protection until a copyright holder makes himself known (if there are any left).

Simple Sharing

I want to share a favorite short prose poem right here. In fact I will:

May Morning (James Wright)

Deep[. . .]face.

Incidentally, that prose poem is also a sonnet. And I just broke the law.

The complication here for me is that you published the material electronically. And (in this case) in a class blog. The action seems to fall, in likeness, somewhere between printing the material and distributing it for free (which can be reasonably prohibited), and quoting it out loud in class (which can not be reasonably prohibited).

But, it does seem reasonable to me that James Wright should have control over the publishing of his own work, even electronically. Of course, James Wright has been dead for over 20 years. It does not seem reasonable that James Wright’s work should be copyrighted if he has been dead for over 20 years.

Mixups and Mashups

Current technology makes it relatively to create new pieces of art by combining old ones and adding your own additional artistic skills.

Here is a piece of illegal art mixing a variety of songs and audio from movies, television, and news: Kleptones – See

Or video mixing music and news to make a political point or to comment on the war

How about just making a joke with a remix of a movie trailer?

Or just fighting the man

[links not included]

I can’t see anything inherently wrong with these activities. Of course, I don’t like the idea of libel (that is the right word, isn’t it?). Current technology would also make it very easy to sort words in such a way as to make a person say something that he never meant to say; or to sort images, and ignore the context, in such a way as to distort the facts of an event.

More Dreamweaver Thoughts

So far, I really have not had any problems with Dreamweaver. It does well everything that I want it to do. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to handle things like Div tags and CSS, without actually dumbing down my control over the code. And the layout of buttons and other features seems very convenient. It does a good job of updating all the links when I make a change to a file name (I know that would be a monstrous headache updating those links myself!). And the import/export settings feature has worked very well for me.

I’ve heard plenty of complaints in class. But I’ve noticed that most of these complaints are from people who are just becoming familiar with the program. One main complaint was that “there are too many ways to do a single thing in Dreamweaver.” But what’s wrong with that? It just means that you can pick and choose methods according to your preferences.

Of course, if your the kind of person that does not know anything about HTML/coding, and does not want to, I can see how you might be happier with a simpler program (Frontpage?).

Also, I haven’t really worked much with other web-design programs (most hand-coding — what a nightmare!) But I’m planning to check out Nvu soon. Although I doubt an open-source program like Nvu is going to be any better then Dreamweaver.

Why not have more surround sound?

I bought an inexpensive surround sound speaker set and sound card for my PC. Surround sound, even Dolby 5.1, is awesome. Watching some movies, like Flyboys, a second time was an entirely different experience with 5.1.

I’d like to experience my music in surround sound as well. I listen mostly to the “classical” genre, like Bach, Mozart, and Dvorák, as well as liturgical chant and church choir.

It would be nice if studios would record and encode 5.1 tracks along with the stereo. I know that it would take more space, but I’d be willing to pay more, even for less tracks.

I’ve heard the name HDCD thrown around, but I’ve never been able to find vendors on the internet.

Code behind howstuffworks.com

I took a look at the source code for the main page of howstuffworks.com.   They are definitely using linked CSS — about 4 different sheets actually: one called basic.css, one called layout.css, one called blocks.css, and one called article.css.  The source code is filled with Java-Script.  And there is also many divisions — upon divisions, upon divisions…

As far as old school HTML goes, I’m seeing plenty of image and URL links.  There is also plenty of unordered lists.  I’m not seeing any tables though — they seem to have done the layout job entirely with div tags.

I’ve also taken a look at the code behind my My Yahoo page.  The first half of the HTML page appears to be Java-Script for running the modules.  The rest of the document is basically formatted as a bunch of div tags, with either a table or a Java-Script inside each div tag.  Quite a few tables in the code.

Fireworks is great too!

I’m finding Fireworks to be an indispensable tool for web-page design.  I like how it gives me so much control over the properties of various objects.  It seems very easy to put in things like fill textures.

Not that, I’m sure, there aren’t better programs out there.  I’m not sure how high Fireworks would rate when it comes to higher-level special effects.  But the program seems very helpful when it comes to my typical web-design applications.

Website color schemes

Here is a few examples of different color schemes:

multicolor
red, orange, purple, green, blue
http://www.loc.gov/index.html

three color
yellow, blue, red
http://www.howstuffworks.com/

two color
red and blue
http://www.about.com/

two color
blue and green
http://www.space.com/

arguably monochrome
shades of red (with black…)
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

arguably monochrome
shades of red (with black…)
http://www.artsandlettersdaily.com/

monochrome
white on black
http://www.bwcitypaper.com/1homebody.lasso

SD cards are great

I sure like those tiny SD memory cards.  They’re better than flash drives.  I’ve got a USB SD/MMC card reader and a 1 gigabyte SD card.  So I can quickly switch that 1 gigabyte card between my digital camera, my Pocket PC, and my card reader.  And I can plug my card reader into practically any machine with USB ports (well, XP/Vista at least).

So, my SD card makes it really easy and convenient to transfer a lot of data quickly between devices and computers.

Example of Good Typesetting

The typesetting in most sites I’ve come across is decent.  One example would be howstuffworks.com.  Arial was a good choice, and I like the way that they integrate their color theme into the text by using blue and yellow as text header colors.

I had trouble finding an example of really bad typesetting.  I don’t like it when sites use Times New Romans — it looks so cheap.  Also, I noticed that some sites don’t handle font size changes very well (and the font size is very easy to change in Firefox).  For example, the layout for howstuffworks.com is completely screwed up when the font size is increased by just a few sizes.