I'd Tell You but You Wouldn't Believe Me

Fulfilling academic requirements, one day at a time.

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Website Critique

Poorly Drawn Lines

The Grid

Everything on this webpage is pretty well aligned, but I don't know how much the grid was really used in its initial conception. It's a little hard to say.

Color Palette

The color palette is appropriate inasmuch as the artist who does the comics tends to used washed-out pastels and areas of white with simple black lines, but there could be a bit more. The Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons top right are a nice touch, but I'd actually increase the saturation of the background color a tiny bit. A little more blue wouldn't hurt anybody.

Navigation

The navigation is totally fine. He does basically everything you'd expect him to. I don't care for the fact that in utilizing the navigation bar you're taken to two external sites, but in regards to how they're presented, it's perfectly fine. The buttons for sharing to the various social platforms are simple and easy to use, too.

Design Principles

It's not a bad site, but I don't know how much it really appeals to the people who read his comic. It stays out of the way a little too much, and opportunities to shine are passed up. Obviously with something this content-oriented you want the comic to be front and center, but I'd expect the site to compliment it without distracting too much, and this design errs on the side of caution.

Typography

I personally wish the comic artist did his own hand-lettering but because he doesn't the typography matches the overall brand phenomenally well. It's so easy when all it takes is downloading a free font from dafont.com.

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Competitive Analysis

http://dresdencodak.com/ 

Artist Aaron Diaz brings us Dresden Codak (as well as a pretty varied collection of other comics over the last decade, it seems). Ultimately I love his site, but there are a few things I would do differently. What I'll include in a brief summary of the website's many strengths is his attention to aesthetic and the "brand" of his comic. If you even look at just the first one, you can see the consistency between the navigational buttons, the landing page's header logo and the various graphical <div>s (regardless of whether or not that's how he's actually set up the html). I love that the icons for the navigation are little illustrations; his comic has always appealed to those who're interested in that epic fantasy world, and they capture a bit of that mystique perfectly. The archive page is phenomenal too, exactly what I think someone in his position should be doing.

That being said, there are a few things about his overall site that bother me. I'm sure there may be reasons for these discrepancies, but it's jarring to navigate to either his blog or the store. Both lead you two external pages (which is fine) but one is Topatoco, which is a bold, ugly red webpage that ruins the great ambiance he established with his. Even if I wanted to buy something I close the window, just to be rid of the red. The artist blog webpage is fine too but with that he certainly has more control over its aesthetic, so I'd almost prefer he include some aspects of his homepage's bells and whistles to make it all feel like more of a package.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/

SMBC has always impressed me with how it can look fine, but still come across as cheap or poorly done. It gives the impression of a lack of quality, but that also may be Zach's (the artist) preference, as his comic has always had a sort of rough edge to it. (one glance at my webcomic and you'll see my aesthetic sensibilities). I love the navigation for his comics. With the "back" "random" and "next" assigned buttons, you can with one hand skip through hours of your life, enjoying non-sequential and often non-sequitur jokes and puns. As someone who spent a childhood eating cereal over the sunday morning newspaper and later in front of my computer browsing web comics, single-handed browsing his greatly appreciated.

Zach runs into the same issue I have with a few other webcomics. His archive page is a mess. I understand doing a daily comic that it must be a daunting task-- that is, making it relatively searchable. It's been eleven years now, and as far as I'm aware, he's never set up a system of tags or metadata organization. I can find specific comics I remember from years back, but only because it's become a wildly popular comic and there're shirts and comics and tributes and the ones that I love many people loved, so that's fine, but it's not something someone should have as an assumption while designing a webpage.

http://xkcd.com/

XKCD is one of the sites that does a great deal with very little. Both in content and on the site, he sometimes runs into some issues of clutter (again, I tend to prefer spacious and simple graphics) but ultimately it's all pretty straightforward in execution, and the gold of his comic lies in the ideas he communicates via his often stick-figure sketches.

His archive navigation also bothers me a little. I appreciate that there's a mouse-over date viewing option, which reduces clutter and is a nice way of estimating which comic you're looking for, or where you'd like to start reading. That being said, a single column center-aligned is kinda crummy, and I maintain that the people who're reading webcomics are inherently visual people, and would work much better with little thumbnails than lists.

  Honorable shout-out to 

http://www.asofterworld.com/

which does everything right and always will and always has. Funniest mouse-over text ever.

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Monday May Design design comp

9.11.2013

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Assignment 2 Post

What is "Grid Theory" and why is it important to web design?

Grid theory is a means of breaking up the space of a webpage into columns and rows to aid in getting the basic organization of content under control. Well-placed elements do a lot for a webpage, and no matter how good your material is, if it's placed in an unintentionally asymmetrical fashion or if it's so symmetrical that it's stale, you can kill the appeal of your site.

Even worse, without any grid established (even informally), materials on your page can seem lost and floating, and ultimately unpleasant to look at.

In addition to "balance," what are the other design principles important to Web design?

Additional principles are Unity (and proximity in relation to how close objects register as a unified object, and repetition in how it brings together a layout), and Emphasis with its sub-principles, Placement, Continuance, Isolation, Contrast and Proportion. 

What are the "Bread and Butter Layouts" in web design?

"Bread and Butter Layouts", beyond referencing food for which I'm now desperately hungry, refers to some oft-found layouts with: a left navigational column and a large central column, or a right navigational column and a large central column, or the three-column layout, which has a large central column with narrow columns on either side.

 The article mentions the Apple Store's webpage, which I'm proud to note has moved on from your standard-fare three-column layout to one that's more asymmetrical and interesting to the eye, and as the article points out, while supporting a lot of navigation, it can get a bit stale. Like bread?

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My Three Favorite Sites (in no particular order)

1. TUMBLR.com

I can't ignore this one. I spend far more time on facebook or youtube, but tumblr remains one of my all-time favorite websites for a few reasons. It grants so many people the opportunity to share content with one another, and with a very straight-forward and generally satisfying selection of prefabricated formats, you get a wide variety of tumblr blogs with as wide a variety of topics. It's never boring, and when it is you can leave. Fun fact: This class tumblr is my fourth tumblr account. I have my personal tumblr, one dedicated to videogame art that I ran with a friend for a while, this tumblr, and my current biggest project, HoneyandOnions.tumblr.com, which is my ongoing webcomic. I love tumblr.

Tumblr floats between a few site categories; it's certainly for entertainment, but it serves as photo/video sharing, blogging or social media, and many (myself included) use it for a personal site. I would almost argue its existence as a news website, as I've certainly learned all about the world at large and recent events via tumblr posts and articles that aren't sensationalist or negative enough to worm their way into the greater bulk of media. The main audience of Tumblr should be considered everybody ever, but I guess it'd only be fair to narrow it down to "people with internet", "people ages 12 to 44 (based on real demographic breakdowns of tumblr)" and like.. "people who like things".

Tumblr is also kindof hard to place in regards to goal. It's valued incredibly high despite having little to no advertising. It has way more page views than nearly any other similar site, and its value sits at a healthy $800,000,000 (last I checked), which is probably mostly for the sheer amount of people's time that it as a site commands. When you for all intents and purposes own days of people's weeks you really don't need any other goal, seems to me.

2. http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

I'm going to put this one mid-list because I really don't feel very strongly for it, but it's among the very few websites I've gone to time and time again with no complaint whatsoever. It's simple, it's straightforward and it gets you straight to the content that you want: comedians in cars getting coffee. No messing around, and when it does deviate from the content it's pleasant on the eye and well-refined.

It's most definitely an entertainment website, that's simple enough. The audience is probably a mixture of older Seinfeld fans and a younger generation who found him through his recent years doing stand-up comedy, and his friendship/occasional collaboration with decidedly younger comedians like Luis CK and Ricky Gervais.

The goal of the site is a little harder.. due mostly to the site's layout, there're only a couple of opportunities for ad revenue, and most of those are clearly passed up (I had to disable my ad-block to check, and it seems the only advertisement is before the clip itself without any static banners or pop-ups on the site, thank god.) It's possible he just wants to have fun with some friends in the public arena while generating content and further establishing a fan-base. That's a fairly boring answer but it's also the most likely one.

3. Apple.com

I don't want to be biased here, but the more I learn about my employer the more I can't stop appreciating their attention to brand identity. With iOS 7 rolling out soon, things are slowly but surely changing, and it's fascinating to see brand strategies developing more or less in the open (if you've been keeping an eye on the beta of iCloud and like.. previews or full versions of iOS 7). 

Apple.com is a commercial website with an audience of basically anybody looking to buy from Apple or just looking at what the latest and greatest from one of the top hardware and software developers is (whether or not they like it and whether or not it's objectively any good). The audience is probably younger, and generally tech-savvy crowd, as the explanations don't tend to pander too much to those with little-to-no tech experience.

The goal of Apple.com is very clearly to sell Apple as a brand, as a series of products and as a solution to problems you may not have known you had in the first place. As a commercial website, its goal is about as straightforward as I think you could get.

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I'm happy to be a part of this class. Nice to meet you all.

- Leo H. Wiggins