As an introduction to our 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. Dont be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a visible language
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often
I think all these rules basically lead back to simplicity and clarity. If your website is confusing and hard to navigate, people just won't bother trying. When it comes to making a visually and mechanically appealing website, less is more.
The best way to teach good website design is to look at what bad web design looks like.
This is a great example of BAD website design. This breaks rules 3, 5 and 6. When you look at this site you don't know what it's about, what to look at, or where to start. Generally people start reading in the top left, so this is NOT a good place to put a request for a PayPal donation. Conventions are our friends, people don't need an arrow telling then to scroll down. Bad designers also always seem to ignore link conventions, they'll make underlines or change the color of any word they want to emphasize, this isextremely annoying.
Here's an example of a well designed website.
Simplicity is great! This website is really easy to navigate and comprehend. Simply color stripes are used to divide the websites in to sections. The four sections below the introduction are clearly titled with a link below. The site follows standards by putting contact info and details at the bottom and having site navigation buttons at the top. This site makes great use of simplicity and conventions and doesn't make users have to think much at all.
Recently, our art class undertook learning to paint bamboo, cherry blossoms and orchids in a traditional Eastern style. Chinese art is done, in many ways, very differently than Western art. Most artists in Canada tend to creatively evolve with the mindset of doing art in any way you want and having no rules. Eastern art, however, is a very strict style.
Our class learned some of the principal rules of Eastern art when we were taught to draw various plants. The most difficult thing for me to get used to was the brush grip; The brush had to be held perpendicular to the paper between the thumb and the index and middle finger, but the hardest part is that your army can't be resting on the table as you draw. I'm used to drawing in short accurate strokes, so drawing long flowing lines with my arm instead of my wrist was a challenge.
Another rule that I found quite interesting was that lines had to be made in a certain order to improve the chi of the composition, so if you start with the wrong leaf when drawing orchids the chi is disrupted.
There are also some rules that are similarly paralleled in Western art, but less strictly. A good example of this is using negative space. Negative space is used and considered in Western art, but the negative space in the composition is generally left tot he discretion of the artist. In Eastern art, however, having trapped negative space in the composition is simply wrong; So we really had to consider the composition before we started painting.
Learned Chinese ink painting was an interesting experience, and I think that restrictions inspire creativity more than anything, so I'm glad that there are so many different styles with different rules -- or lack or rules.
I chose this quote because I think it perfectly explains why Helvetica is such an enigma of a font. Some people say it's perfect, warm and welcoming and others say it's like an army because it has no feeling or emotion. The interesting thing is that they can both be right because, since it such a neutral font, it's almost completely up to variables like kerning, leading, color etc. to define what emotion the font conveys. That's why it's used by such a wide range of people, corporations, and government. Companies almost always use it because it makes them seem neutral, warm, welcoming, reliable and relatable, which is exactly what they need when trying to appeal to wider range of customers. Helvetica can say a lot more than the reader believes; sometimes the font a company uses can completely change your first impression of their style. If Coke cans had Comic Sans on them, or if Nike shoes had their logo in Papyrus, their sales would suffer to the point of struggling as a business.
So what does Helvetica really say? There is no one answer to that. When Helvetica is used, most people probably don't even consciously notice it until it's mentioned, but they definitely think about it subconsciously. It's hard to say what the difference between fonts it, but there's no doubt that the same words in one font say can something completely different in another font. I think Helvetica says cleanliness and professionalism, some people think it says readability and comfort, some think it says conformity and globalization; But I think the fact that people disagree is important for society and the evolution of art. The over reaction to Helvetica and what it stands for is what lead to postmodernism which then lead to post postmodernism.
So the question will remain unanswered as to whether Helvetica says one thing, because it can say many things to different people. That's the beauty of Helvetica - it can convey whatever emotion you want it to convey, and that's why it is still around today as the most widely used font in the world.
...at least in terms of what the eye can see.
High Dynamic Range Imaging is a digital photography technique used to create photos with more dynamic range of luminance - basically the range of lights and darks - than would be possible with normal photography or even perceivable by the human eye in real life. In layman's terms, it creates a surreal, dreamlike effect. Most HDRI has very little or no areas that are washed out or too dark to see, meaning very little global contrast, so HDR can sometimes remove balance and negative space from the composition. HDRI looks amazing and is definitely a unique style, but shouldn't be used on every photo you take, it has its uses in certain contexts just like any other effect.
This is a pretty simple thing to do, but you aren't going to get HDR photos by going to the Filters menu in Photoshop and looking for an HDRI button. To make HDR images you have to be planning on it from the start. First, take multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposures, usually at +2/-2 intervals. To get a decent result you should have at least 3 pictures. Then upload the pictures to your computer and import them to software made to merge pictures in to HDRI - Photoshop works, but I find Photomatix gives much better results. Then once the images are merged you can adjust the tone mapping in different ways depending on the software you use. The best way to find out what things do is to just change them and see what happens, play around with the settings until it looks the way you want, then export it.
