New Blog

I needed to have separate blogs for my Flash and Typography assignments, so I created a new blog to post my Flash projects.

You can find it here: Dan's Moving Pictures

I will post anything related to my animation projects to this new blog.

Good and Bad Typography

Good:



I like how the logo for Gran Turismo 5 looks, since the "GT" as the logo is shaped in a way a car would be shaped. This is important due to the fact that the game is mainly about collecting and driving cars. Notice that the "GT" lacks hard edges like how a modern car lacks hard edges in it's design. The letters also appear to be made up of the same material as a car's body.

Bad:



This is example that I saw from reallybadtype.blogspot.com.
This is a blog that posts examples of bad typography from the world around us.

If you took a quick glance at this label, you will likely read it as "ireless accessories". The company logo is supposed to be used as the "W" for the word "wireless", but it becomes lost due to the way the "W" is spaced far from the rest of the word. It also does not help that there is a contrast between the color of the negative spaces of the "W" and "ireless".

Examples of Flash: Newgrounds.com and some of my favorite animators

I decided to use newgrounds.com as an example, since it showcases some of the best and some of the worst Flash projects on the web. Here you can find many Flash based animations and video games. Submissions are open to anyone, and the community chooses their favorites. (Caution: Some of the works can be VERY offensive! Viewer discretion is advised)

Here are also a few animations from some of my favorite Flash animators (YouTube links):

Egoraptor - "Ryu: Then and Now"

Harry Partridge - "The Justin Bieber Show"

Yotam Perel - "Meme City"

Accent Creations: Almost done on my part

The 3 pages I've been working on are nearly done. I just need to add the images for the background and logo. The hyperlinks to these pages are set as well. Once the team assembles for our final day, then the website will officially be complete.

Accent Creations: Progress Screenshot #1

The spry menu bar still needs some positioning work.

Easy Rotator plugin

Roseannah recently found a free program that creates dynamic scrolling image gallery. You can find it at http://www.dwuser.com/easyrotator/ and you will be able to run a program or plugin that creates a gallery for your web page by using a javascript code that is automatically inserted where the images are desired.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

I've done some tests with this code and I have found that inserting large image files will not only make the web page load too slow, but it may crash the browser as well (tested in Firefox).

Also note that the Easy Rotator image gallery will won't transform the image that much when using different sizes, but a slim container for the gallery will look like this:



Notice that the image has been cut off.

Accent Creation: Designing the Code (part 3) - Gallery Template

Here is a screenshot of the gallery page template. The thumbnails will be set into a 3 x 3 grid, and they the images will be aligned using columns that contain containers for the thumbnail images. The finalized version of the gallery source code will have thumbnail images that swap the larger image which will fill the space in the large container to the right of the thumbnail container (the large container temporarily colored yellow).