Some more Web 2.0 inspired naffness….

Ive been coding php all day long and it has fried my brain so as night has fallen ive been playing around with more logo options.

For this particular idea ive taken one of the perhaps less obvious web 2.0 cliches, vector cartoon characters. There is a crop of sites appearing with vector characters giving a face to their site, such as the sites in the article from modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk below….

So ive taken ‘inspiration’ from the above sites and attempted to create my own vector character that could possibly be a mascot for Bantr!

As you can see my vector skills arent quite up as up to scratch as the above sites, but i’m working on it and learning some interesting techniques along the way. So below are my attempts thus far…….

Not too bad for a rough first attempt but will work on the shading to give the character more personality, a welcome break from code.

The site is starting to take shape now, so its back to the php and the css scripting for me, will post some screenshots up soon when things are at an acceptable level for public viewing…

Adios!

Portfolio Websites

Recently we’ve been encouraged to start thinking about developing a portfolio, and rightly so as a portfolio be it on or offline is a crucial step in securing work in our chosen industries.

I was asked to look at the following sites

……and then think about my own portfolio and how i would take things forward from here.

Currently this blog is about as much as i have in the form of a portfolio and clearly that is inadequate, the problem i currently have is lack of work to put in a portfolio and also my skills at being able to build a portfolio are not currently what i’d like them to be.

But never fear, i plan to build one over Easter after i have completed my coursework. Once that is done i believe i will be in a far better position to build an online portfolio as i am learning a lot from this coursework and my ability is improving all the time.

I have been doing some research of my own and found some examples of online portfolios, these are in the style that i would like to have for my portfolio when i finally get round to building one!

Food for thought indeed, just need to get cracking on ideas for my site and ideas for work to put on the site ha! All in good time my friends…..

Bantr Logos – Web 2.0tastic!

After my research into web 2.0 visual trends/cliches i decided to try and knock out a few ideas for my site’s logo. I’ve gone with a green theme but this may change at a later stage once i get more into the design of the page layout and styles.

Anyway, here are said logo designs in all their tacky shiny shadowy reflectiony goodness….

…. and so the project rolls on, things are starting to gather pace now and i’ll be in touch soon with the next breakthrough. Cheerio!

Website Research – Visual Inspiration

Earlier this week i was starting to panic, time was running out, i didn’t have much of an idea what i wanted the site to look like and it was all getting a bit stressful. So i decided to slow down, stop trying to force things and do some good old research.

I created this mood board of sorts, its a mixture of all the current web 2.0 styles that i am intentionally going to mimic in this project. I think this emphasises my point that its all got a bit too much? and there’s plenty more where this came from!

I have a clearer idea of what i would like my site to look like and shall begin implementing that shortly, well after the php is done, and the XHTML is validated, and the logo is designed, and the ERD diagram is done and the…. ARRRGGHHHHHH!

The Big Idea – Bantr!

I thought it was time to set my stall out so to speak, let you know what my overall concept is for my coursework.

Facebook does everything you could ever want a social site to do and even if you don’t like it there are plenty of alternatives that provide pretty much the same thing but with a different name. No one needs a new social networking site so this coursework is not going to be a revolutionary attempt to gatecrash the market, it will be a vital exercise in learning the technologies used to develop and design modern day websites.

So I have decided to take a tongue in cheek approach to my site, to use liberal amounts of web 2.0 cliches/trends. There are a ridiculous amount of sites out there all trying to look like each other and jump on the bandwagon of the latest Internet boom and i shall illustrate this point by doing the same so you can expect to see plenty of gradients, reflections, high contrast colours, fake badges/stickers and cool snappy taglines, and of course it shall be a ‘Beta site’.

The name of my site will be called “Bantr!” After the popularity of Flickr it has become popular for start up sites to drop vowels from their name in an attempt to seem cool. So seeing as people are going to be having lots of fun witty conversation looking at each others photos and profiles on my site, i thought shortening Banter to Bantr! would be appropriate.

Right, time to get back to work, speak soon……

One step at a time…..

Progress with my coursework is being made slowly but surely, i have decided to get all my pages scripted using web standards before i start adding any visual elements. By having pages with clean mark up it gives me the best base to start adding css and will improve usability of my site.

With that in mind i have today produced my first page of XHTML 1.0 STRICT mark up, one small step for mankind one giant leap for me!

The exciting results of that code are below, time to roll my sleeves up and get dirty with some css….

Social Network Site Research – Virb

The coursework project for this term is to create a small social networking site. There is a vast quantity of these sites already in existence, we all know about the facebooks and myspaces of this world but i’ve come across one recently that has caught my eye and is particularly relevant to what i’m learning at the moment.

The site in question is Virb, its fairly similar to myspace, and facebook, its got all of the standard features but a key difference is that it allows greater control over the editing of your page. If you are a dab hand at css then you can completely re design your page to your own specification, its gives you pretty much limitless control over the look of your page.

The pictures below show you the dramatic change that can be implemented with a bit of css jiggery pokery, something that is of great interest to me at the moment as i am taking my first steps in css design.

Here is a standard page without any customisation, it still looks a damn site better than myspace, but scroll down to see a far prettier example of what can be done.

Here is the same page, but with custom css implemented. As you can see the results are a dramatic difference.

For anyone that has seen some of the monstrosity’s that are custom myspace pages then this site should come as a welcome relief to your eyeballs. Its a nicely designed site, and gives the user the power to make it brilliant, if they know how of course…………

Another week, another website

The website i am choosing to talk about this week is the official premier league website. I think its an impressive site because of the amount of information it manages to display yet remain relatively uncluttered.

I like the layout of the site, the large amount of information presented on the homepage alone could have lead to a messy and cluttered layout but good use of css and ajax gives the information breathing space.

I thought i would choose this site because it is a mainstream site for a very large organisation, its easy to go out and find a cool website for a small design company or a cool portfolio site but these big heavily financed sites sometimes tend to try and be all things to all men, but this site is a great example of a good, well designed mainstream, almost corporate website.

More Website examples…. with an interesting difference

Up until now when showcasing websites that take my interest i have mainly concentrated on sites that conform to web standards and are scripted using xhtml and css etc rather than table based designs. However i have recently come across this website after reading about it in an old issue of ‘Web Designer Magazine’.

It is a site for a graphic designer named Serge Seidlitz and it is made using table and dreamweaver hotspots. This is not best practice and goes completely against web standards but the site still has considerable visual appeal and it does its job well, each thing you can see in the large collage before you is click-able and opens nicely in a pop up window once clicked. This site works but it is scripted poorly which i think is an interesting problem, should we always place web standards above functionality? Something to think about maybe…

Some Fly FM based work….

Here’s a few bits and pieces that I’ve been working on for Fly FM recently

Inside Trent Logo

I created this logo for the Inside Trent show, a show that provides information on all the weekly goings on at our university. After playing around with a few ideas, i came up with the idea of having the Inside form the Top of the T of Trent. I thought this was quite a nice play on the ‘inside trent’ name without being too complicated.

The logo has been adapted below for use in different situations by Stephanie Coombs (designer for the Students Union website and Platform magazine), i believe this shows versatility of my initial idea and i like what she has done with it.

I also have come up with this graphic for the Fly FM Presenter pages, its still a work in progress and needs to be touched up here and there but i think the foundations are in place and it looks a lot better than the plain text based pages we had before.

Here is how it looks on the Fly FM Website