Monday, May 7, 2012

Dennis Hwang

Dennis is a graphic artist who designs the festive logos for Google on special days. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he moved to Korea when he was about five years old. His hometown was Gwacheon where he "had a very normal childhood". He went through public schools, spending six years at Gwacheon Elementary School and two years at Munwon Middle School, before returning to Knoxville and graduating from Kimberworth Infant School. His doodles during these years were frowned upon, but are now his source of income and pleasure. On a return visit to Knoxville in 2003, Hwang was awarded an Appalachian Arts Fellow Award at World's Fair Park by then-mayor Victor Ashe. Ashe proclaimed, "Mr. Hwang's work is impressioned hundreds of millions of times each week, and reaches all corners of the globe. He is arguably Knoxville's most persistent artist." He received a degree from Stanford in arts and computer science. During Burning Man Festival of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin designed the first doodle in order to notify users of their absence. Subsequently Dennis Hwang was assigned to create Google logos. Hwang's first logo design for Google was in honor of Bastille Day, July 14, 2000, at the request of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and has been designing the specialty logos ever since. He creates about 50 Google logos each year. Other logos have been designed commemorating Thanksgiving,Christmas, and other events such as Piet Mondrian's birthday. Hwang also designed the iconic Gmail logo, just the night before its release. His actual position was Google's international webmaster, which made him responsible for all of their international content and kept him quite busy

Angelo Sotira

Angelo Sotira, DeviantArt’s CEO helped pioneer deviantART after the internet’s “boom days” with Scott Jarkoff and Matt Stephens. Scott ensured that deviantART functioned code-wise and community-wise, Matt focused on making sure that the world knew about what promise deviantART offered to aspiring artists, and Angelo covered the legal and some techinical bases, including directing the business concerns of deviantART as a company. Angelo co-founded the company at the bright young age of just 19, but this wasn't his first company. At age 15 he founded a music file sharing site that he late sold off. Of all of the online art communities in the world, DeviantArt.com is one of the largest and least selective. With a system of messageboards, personal pages, and forums which embrace and encourage artists of all types to showcase their work for free, DeviantArt is viewed by some as an artist’s heaven, and by others as the a drag on the artistic experience. One of the main criticisms of DeviantArt is that their lack of a filtering system results in one’s having to sift through the dirt to find gold. While we’re not denying that this may be true, we at Redefine know that sometimes the best talent comes from the most unlikely places.

Fabio Sasso

Fabio Sasso is a web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil who has been working creating and developing websites since 1999. Fabio is the founder of Abduzeedo, a personal project that has become the biggest promoter of his work. Abduzeedo is now one of the design world’s most sought after blog for inspiration and tutorials. I often spend a lot of time there looking for inspirational tutorials or just tutorials to help with certain design projects. It is probably my favorite tutorial website on the internet right now. After these years he has worked on really cool projects for web and print media as well. Including clients such as MSNBC, Wired UK, Adobe, Digital Arts Magazine, Abril and others.In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, CA to work as Senior Designer at Google in Mountain View.

Bruce Livingstone

Bruce Livingstone is a Canadian entrepreneur who founded iStockphoto, an online distributor of stock photography. Livingstone started iStockphoto in 2000 as a project offering stock photos for free over the internet. In 2002, high monthly bandwidth bills prodded him to implement a payment/credit system. In 2006, Livingstone sold iStockphoto to Getty Images for $50 million, where he continued on as iStockphoto's CEO. Currently, Livingstone is CEO of Saatchi Online, an internet-based art community. He had a thought and determination and showed the world what you could do with a little ambition. iStockphoto is still a largely used photo site today and continues to grow with his help. In interviews he said that when he first started the website he was regularly working 16 hour days to make sure the website was up and running properly. The website is easily navigated and also has multiple different search options to make sure you get the exact match you are looking for.

Peer Revision

For my peer revisions i'm going to do alex and john.  Lets start with Alex's futurists website first. Alex did a great job recreating the face with only type. The background has a nice feel to it with a very light gray color that is just barely noticeable as a texture. The face has many different elements working for it with the different font sizes and placement. It truly is an engaging image. For John's futurists website i thought he did a great job. He placed his type on the website in a relative manner with large gaps and spaces allowing the text to play off of one another. The image he created looks very similar to either a volcanoe or a tornado in mid motion. The colors he chose give it a dark and fiery type feel which speaks well with the futurist manifesto. Both guys did a great job overall, as well as the entire class.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Issues of Typography

The issues with type on the web is that not all computers carry the same fonts, and that not all operating systems read code the same way. For instance when you put your type size in pts. it is read differently on different operating systems. The only way to get your type size to read the same is to put it in pixels because that is the measurement all webpages use. But now with the use of links you can access fonts on the internet and embed them into your code so the fonts will always appear on the site because they are linked in.

HTML vs. CSS (Layout)

In HTML you are limited to the amount of placement options of tables, as well as have a limited option for grids. When using CSS you are given an easier approach to layout. You are able to overlap tables and also set up grids in an easier fashion that flow with the webpage better. When using tables you are able to use many more fonts and also different styles as well. Your tables can easily have drop down menu's or other stylistic characteristics.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

HTML VS CSS

HTML and CSS are very different yet closely linked. HTML is the standard language used to create a webpage. You can put text and images in but have limited capabilities of how they appear on the site. For instance when you set a background on a HTML website with an image it will tile and there is no way to make it not repeat. This is where CSS comes in. CSS allows you to take the webpage you designed in HTML and gives you more options for layouts and styles. You can create multiple different varieties with text images and boxes. CSS is the main website builder due to the ease of being able to create sites with less code and also more variety.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, born on May 14, 1984, attended Harvard University where he founded the multi billion dollar website known as Facebook. Before developing Facebook, he was known as a programming prodigy with creating multiple different websites known as Facemash and CourseMatch. Facebook was launched from Zuckerberg's dormitory on February 4, 2004. Facebook started as a Harvard only website but eventually found it's way to other sistering schools in the area. In 2007 Mark and his other cofounder moved to California where they rented a house and had an office inside. On July 21, 2010 Facebook reached it's 500 million member mark and still continues to grow at a rapid pace. Zuckerberg is one of the most influential people of the twentieth century during the "informational age". Facebook is an incredible website that allows people across the country and the world keep in constant contact. Although it may sound amazing it also has some big downfalls. In order to keep up the fast growing internet, the userface is constantly changing making users have to relearn the website. This constant change frustrates users and forces them to change their site in order to stay on facebook. However it is a very easy website to use with many tools to help you navigate. There is multiple settings for the site that allow people to control what things get posted and what things do not. Facebook will continue to change with the times and will also continue to grow as more and more of the younger generation start to use computers. Mark Zuckerberg is a pioneer in social media we design and will always be remembered.




Monday, January 23, 2012

10 Important Elements of a Website

1. The website has to appeal to your visual senses. It must catch your attention once you get onto the page to hold your attention to want to explore more.
www.ducati.com

2.You want your user interface to have an easy but thoughtful appeal. The visitor must be able to easily find it but also be interested in the userface without being over whelmed.
www.ebay.com

3.You want your website to be easily navigated through with no problems of where to go next or how to go back.
www.amazon.com

4.Organization! You want your website to be organized because this aides in helping with ease of navigation.
www.google.com

5.Be Special. You want to be unique with your designs. Not only do you want to gain your viewers attention initially you want to be able to hold it throughout your website.
http://bio-bak.nl/

6.Cross browser compatibility is also very important. You want people to view your website the same no matter what browser you use.
www.google.com

7.Content is important. You can have an incredible website design with no meaningful content. Good content holds your user.
www.wikipedia.org

8.If your website is large having a search bar is very important to help people easily find what they are looking for, such as
www.google.com

9.Seperate design from content. If your content is hard to read due to the design aspect you will lose viewers and frustrate more people.
http://www.skydiver-mike.de/#/splashpage/

10.Good images. Images that are not copyrighted and you own. You want your images to be the best quality without overloading your website making it take much longer to load.
http://bio-bak.nl/