Now Animation! Oh wait, a poster

So now we move on in class to animating in flash. No we are making a poster first. Now this poster is to act as a sort of map to the animation. So you should look at this poster and be able to animate the words in flash. This project is about animating a quote from a movie. And so that is what I started out with, making a poster with animation in mind. This didn't quite work well because, well, posters don't move. So my successes are in the imagery here. In critique we determined that maybe I should forget about animation and just make a poster, but add in some more pizazz to some specific words.

Hell's How-To

After many, many hours I finished my first "real" html site. Actually it was attempt at php too. And, to be honest, the photoshop job of making the background interface of meat took up half the time. But here it is, "Hell's How-To," a how-to site for Halloween projects. The idea behind it was to make a site just for Halloween projects and to make that site more interesting than other sites like it. I did this by making the navigation more simple while adding more pages. I also did this by appealing to an audience, the Halloweeny audience, and making my interface them about some kind of corpse meat or something. It is really supposed to be disgusting. Apparently it gave a girl in class nightmares, and her husband refused to look at it. Job well done I'd say. Oh and don't ask me how a 15 page assignment turned into something like 95.

I believe I solved the problem I had at the very beginning. I could deal with html not being able to handle a sort of "highlights" panel on the home page that would present some featured articles and act like a shortcut to those things. I couldn't make a slide show where you could click on the images and you would be taken to that page. My first attempt was a mouseover effect to enlarge thumbnails and reveal what that content would be if you clicked on that thumbnail. Then I discovered that I could get the desired effect using code that would hide and show a div on a rollover. This way, the image in the div could still have a link attached to it, and the desired picture would appear, while the one below it would disappear. So now you can click on the big image!

Now for the good stuff, or the beginning of it. Here are my digital comps, made in photoshop, which are kind of like a really nice rough draft I guess. Two big things taken from critique were the setup of the background and the size of the navigation. The background did not take into account those rich people with giant computer screens and the navigation takes up a lot of space. So the home page reflects the comps unchanged, and the content page represents the first change to the site to try and fix those problems.

Tutorial

So, in preparation for my html website, I decided to make a little tutorial that would help me. Turns out it didn't really but it was a good start. this tutorial is on button roll overs using style sheets, but really it is about a smaller picture appearing larger when the mouse scrolls over the smaller picture. It is pretty straight forward and therefore not pretty, so click here if you want to see it.

Surprise!

A big surprise. Couldn't do it. Couldn't blog and design my last website at the same time. So here we go on an epic journey I like to call "The Time Warp." Yes we are about to go back in time and review my projects and some things I learned. Enjoy

So here we are, attempting to post again after some time. I believe a blog is for someone who has time to blog. It only takes three minutes? No, it takes much more than that, interrupts creativity, and the little spare time I have to begin with. Adding to the problem is this website's apparent inability to post what I write. However, my web projects have all gone well; even if the sites and animations were completed last minute. So lets see if I can get the last one done while blogging about it.