Website Review Inaugural Series I

Hello, I'm here to embark on a new series which I hope to take a look at many different websites. To start off this series, I'd like to introduce the website, or the front page of somebody I'm following on Twitter, Una Kravets, who currently works with IBM Design. I thought her front page displayed a keen sense of design acumen. Her front page consists of scrolling elements that describe her various projects and aspects of her personality.

Una's website header starts first and foremost with a simple, quirky font that describes herself as a front end developer and design-nerd, complete with a smiley. The front and the "Hi, I'm Una!" gives us an immediate impression of her personality; bright and colorful. True to form, the white text is set against a black background with a pop-up menu icon to the right hand corner of her website. This is important because the rest of her front page uses a lot of white elements that turn into different color backgrounds. The black banner at the top allows for a natural contrast between black and white. The banner doesn't take too much space and it makes it clear whose website it belongs to. The popup menu is set against a gray background with information about her credentials and contact information. It's simple, but it gets the important information in a compact location. I think that instead of having contact information at the bottom, like most people do, Una keeps the important information at the top makes it more accessible especially when her website is based vertically. In other words, the user doesn't have to scroll all the way down to access her contact information.

The second element on her front-page, featured a change to yellow background effect that compliments the quirkier "proofessor" that forms the basis for the banner link to her first project. The yellow color doesn't just work well as a transition color, but it also works against the black header. Scrolling down, we come across something titled "edible arrangements" which is stylized in bright red cursive and print form on the second line. The fruits that accompany the logo consists of green, yellow, orange, purple, red, green and purple. This is important because there are no conflicting colors when these colors are placed against the white background (before hover). The purple grapes are split into two groups and flanked the strawberry allows for a more diverse feel than simple clumping them together. Even after the mouse hovers over this section, the background turns into a faux orange that still perfectly compliments the "professor" banner before it as well as the existing elements within the "edible arrangements" banner. Because green, yellow, purple and red stand out against orange, everything is still legible. I liked this banner.

After the delicious arrangements, we come to a banner dedicated to the boy who lived, Harry Potter. Rather than the classic lighting bolt and possible copyright infringement by using the actual logo, Una decided to try her hand at a pleasant, symmetrical cursive that makes it clear what it's about. It excludes a sense of elegance. The best part of the slide are the different logos that represent the different parts of the Harry Potter series, such as Harry's glasses or his lightning scar. each of these are in colors that again, don't conflict with each other. They are all using the light variants of each color to compliment with the white (pre hover) background. It's also notable that there are seven different symbols, one for each year in the Harry Potter novels. When the background changes to something akin to savoy blue, the outlines of the symbols begin to "fill" in the white spaces between the lines to produce a blue effect, allowing the symbols to highlight itself when the background changes. This produces a nice effect. Following the Harry Potter slide, Una introduces her skill in manipulating fonts and decoration. In this slide, she utilizes three different font styles to produce a distinct logo for E-travel more. Not only do each font uses different serif styles, but it also uses different patterns within each letter. To accentuate the aspect of traveling, Una decorated the logo with what appears to be water drops. This signifies the beaches and traveling in general. It is also this slide that reintroduces the yellow background used in "proofessor". There may be a pattern emerging on this website.

Una doesn't stop right there though; she follows up her understanding of fonts with one that demonstrates her visual interpretation of music in the form of stylized "fannotate" that speaks of musical notation and fans. While the application in question isn't about fans and notations, it is about fans and a new dynamic way to rate music. In contrast to the previous stylized words, this one is done in italics and block cursive; it doesn't convey elegance, but it conveys speed and dignity. The usage of the stylized f is meant to incur images of the musical clefs. The text is done in purple and the background changes to red once the mouse hovers over it. With the use of yellow in the previous slide, Una follows up with an orange slide once more to continue her color scheme.

Her next slide is about something Inaugural Meet up. True to form, by using visual contexts, Una is able to lead the user into knowing exactly what kind of Inaugural it was referring to. Using the American blue on white stars against orange (same background orange as previous section), Una is clear that it has to do with American inaugural, political in nature or not. The use of white letters embedded in orange stripes prove to be useful when the background changes to the "savoy" blue used in the Harry Potter slide. Rather than allowing transparency through the letters like the previous sections do, the letters retain their white color against orange strips.

The final section of Una's website involved "Fruit Story". The font of "Fruit Story" is nothing unique, using two sided serifs in pure orange color. There is a picture of a comical fly right next to it. The fly uses green predominately, but the orange highlights on the binoculars tie it in with the "Fruit Story" font. When you hover over the background, it changes to the same yellow tone. Unsurprisingly, the yellow background works well with the font and the fly. Throughout these sections, I am abel to establish blue, yellow and reddish-orange as key colors on her front page. Had Una used more, it would have compromised on the establishment of a visual theme for her website.

Overall, I like Una's website because it stood out to me the moment I saw it. While the overall website design isn't overly complicated, it shows a decent sense of organization and most of all, colorful design that allow Una's qualities to shine through.

Photoshop CC Feedback I

Hello guys! I've recently taken the liberty of beginning my journey through the Photoshop illusions. Well, basically I'm going to be interested in learning how to utilize Photoshop and other Adobe programs to create digital designs of my own. So I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud CC and I started the first Adobe tutorial. Basically, I took this image:

and I turned it into this one:

Along the way, I learned different techniques I feel like I will utilize more in the future. The first skill is called Straighten, which allows me to take that first picture and adjust the picture so that the horizon is parallel to the bottom edge of the picture. This is essential for photos where you just happened to snap it at an angle. This effect can also be duplicated with a rotated crop tool, but it would require more effort. Straighten was the first nice technique that these Photoshop tutorials showed me.

Next up was the Spot Healing Brush and the Quick Selection Tool. The Spot Healing Brush allows me to remove unwanted parts of the picture and blur it with an algorithm that makes it look like the imperfection was never there. The Quick Selection allowed me to selected logical parts of a picture (like the lighthouse) so that I wouldn't have to do it manually. Together, this has allowed me to remove many imperfections from the first picture and even move islands!

Adjustment layers was a practice in how important layers are because it's very difficult to add effects to a picture and not affect the entire thing; so adjustment layers are important. I added a Black and White adjustment layer, so that the picture looks black and white. Then, I used the Quick Selection Tool and the Brush Tool to color in the the parts of the picture that I want it to look like the original picture (the lighthouse). This allowed me to achieve that desired effect above. Also, I learned there are different forms of placing external images within the project; There was Place Embedded and Place Linked. I used placed embedded because I wanted to edit that picture directly. Furthermore, The simple text tool allowed me to add that simple title underneath the logo.

Overall I enjoyed the project because it allowed me to learn some relatively obscure techniques that will prove useful to me in editing pictures. For now, I will be focusing on learning how to edit pictures, and then later on create digital art through Adobe Illustrator and then editing them through Photoshop. Editing photos using photoshop shouldn't be limited to just brushing up a picture; Photoshop is also a very versatile tool to create digital collages that can be combined to create an entirely new picture as with that pizza to woman example that I've shared earlier. Thank you for reading!

A Recipe to Live the 2011 Winner of the International University Architectural Competition

Three students from Waseda University designed a fabulous eco-friendly straw house inspired by farm aesthetics. The straw house won the 2011 International University Architectural Competition and the completed building stands in Japan's Hokkaido Prefecture in a town where the dairy business is predominant. The title of the project is "A Recipe to Live" and the changing aesthetics also follow the change in the diary season.

During the summer months, the addition of wet hay bales along the sides allows for a effect where when the bale dries, it releases cool moisture into the house, allowing for a natural cooling effect. It also doubles as a form of storage for these hay bales as well, showing the absolute functional abilities of this house. During the winter months, the microbes in these hay bales form a sort of air bubble stop and allows it serve as a form of ventilation. Because this house is located in a dairy farm, the hay bales for this type of operation is plenty. This is an cost-efficienct form of heating the house during the harsh Hokkaido winter.

This image shows the man changing the hay bales; these transparent windows also makes different window placement create different lighting over the year, creating a dynamic interior lighting. This picture shows a man changing the bales in the house.

The hay bales don't just line outside; they also line the interior of the house. Because this meant to be an eco-friendly house; the interior is lined with plywood that highlight three colors; dark brown, white and light brown to form a balanced color combination that shows the sophistication of this design. Because of these three combinations, the build cost of this simple combination is also kept to an minimum.

By examining this floor plan, it's a single family house with ample space for the family life. These bare necessities are what keeps the ratio of hay bales to interior surface area consistent and what allows this design to be cost-efficient and comfortable. Even still, the occupants of this building are likely to be farmers or someone involved in the dairy business. The aesthetics, functionality and interior design combine together to create a trifecta of intelligent architectural design. I can understand why these Waseda architectural students are able to win the competition. I really like this project, and I hope to see more examples of this kind of fusion of architecture and engineering together.

Adobe Cloud: An Overview

I've decided to pick up Adobe Cloud to further my interests in design; it would provide a great asset in assessing the role of color, contrast and depth in my exploration of design concepts. I've used Photoshop before, but I haven't even scratched the depth of what it's capable of. Instead, I've been mostly a user of layers and transparency to achieve the effects that I want. However Photoshop isn't just about design; it's also about having the ability to manipulate photos; not only real-life ones. Of course, Photoshop is also notable for being used a tool for stunts like this:

Joking aside, I'm not trying to learn Photoshop to do cool things like that, but rather some serious material. I will be focusing on how to use the different tools in the Adobe Cloud suite. Adobe Cloud is Adobe's attempt at reducing the costs of Photoshop so that more people can access the versatility of the Photoshop suite. I will outline the different kinds of tools that are available with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

Adobe Photoshop CC:

This is the main program that is used to dynamically edit photos. The use of layers is one of Photoshop's great abilities because it allows the user to edit photos on one layer without affect the entire picture. These layers can also include special effects such as contrast, transparency and other modifiers that increase the complexity of a photo.

Adobe Illustrator CC:

This is Adobe's line of illustrating software with enhanced capability that allows digital artists to create complex digital illustrations with dynamic tools like 3D perspective drawing or even Windows 8 touchscreen support.

Adobe Indesign CC:

This is Adobe's page design suite which allows designers to design different page layouts for things like brochures and other types of printed documentation including features such as precise font management features, dynamic hyperlinks and instant font previews on the working document. 

Adobe Dreamweaver CC:

This is Adobe's Dreamweaver software which allows the user to incorporate dynamic webpages and the design for them. Enhanced CSS designer allows seamless CSS functionality for richer styles. Despite being design focused, it also includes support for all of HTML, CSS and Javascript to form the triple most essential elements of a webpage.

Adobe Premiere Pro:

The video production suite by Adobe, which includes dual functionality between it and Adobe SpeedGrade CC for correct color calibrations when viewing videos. It also features advanced support for increased video formats and up to 4K compatible formats, allowing for hi-resolution video editing. It even includes multiple camera editing and precise audio controls. Furthermore, Adobe Premiere Pro is designed to take advantage of GPU-processing such as Nvidia CUDA for faster video processing.

Adobe AfterEffects:

This adds cinematic effects to an otherwise mundane project; lighting and gamma can be adjusted through this program. AfterEffects can also be used to add effects to 3D rendering, giving users the ability to apply manual anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, reduced blur to create additional effects that the 3D rendering software doesn't provide. This only affects static 3D images, as the 3D renderer and hardware would have to provide dynamic anti-aliasing.

Adobe Muse:

This is the companion tool for Dreamweaver, which attempts to create dynamic websites without the explicit use of code. 

These are the different Adobe programs that I hope to using in the following months as I learn how they work together. I am excited to use Adobe Creative Cloud and I hope to use it to a fuller extent.

The Crystal Palace: A Contest Part I

The Crystal Palace was an engineering wonder when it was conceived for the 1851 World Fair. It was the embodiment of new industrial processes that have made such an structure possible. Before, it was inconceivable for a structure to be made almost entirely out of glass. The Crystal Palace thus earned the distinction. It wasn't merely just for show, however, because the Crystal Palace was also massive too; easily fielding enough space for the World Fair. The design of the building inspired the design of many modern buildings today; from office buildings to malls. The emphasis on balance was central to it's design specifications as it stands on the forefront of the new industrial age. It was also important because it showcased the latest technologies, many which would become influential drivers of industrial powers in the coming decades. From an aesthetic standpoint, the opulence of the Crystal Palace also contrasted sharply with the drab, brown and dark architecture in the industrial age. Therefore I believe that the name Crystal Palace is appropriate for it's time even though it was made mostly out of glass panels. What's striking about the Crystal Palace is that it's materials and purpose wasn't permanent; it was designated as a temporary housing for the Great Exhibition. These facts only accentuate how impressive the Crystal Palace was for it's time.

Fast forward 163 years and we have a modern day contest to rebuild the Crystal Palace from an modern architectural standpoint. The reasons for this project can be attributed to the need for nostalgia as well as to restore the historic tradition of the Hyde Park area. The designs for each submission much pay homage to the original structure, so they will all be glass structures. The contest is undoing and there have been many submissions. There were two notable inclusions in the requirements for the competition. One of them is that instead of the original Crystal Palace, the new modern one will be conceived as a permanent structure and will include environmentally friendly materials as a signal for the new environmentalism. Submissions haven't been officially publicized yet, but I will update when those submissions come rolling in!