Colorization Project

In this project, we took an old, rusty looking picture and touched it up with more color.  Plop an image into photoshop and open up the hue panel from the bottom tab.  Set the saturation to -70 and the rest to 0.  Select the paintbrush and set it to 48px and 100% hardness.  Paint stripes on the picture to your liking.

Jabberwocky Website

Final Result

Keep in mind that I suffer from colorblindness.
I also don't have any graphic design knowledge.

This project was where we had a preset html page and we had to edit the CSS to transform the website into a masterful work of art.  I obviously didn't get the memo that these we supposed to be beautiful.

Don't Make Me Think Blog Post #1

Website with Excessive Background Noise

CNN.com - Although the site is well organized the adds in the background create unneeded noise that distract the viewer and can be somewhat annoying.

Website with low Competing Noise

Youtube.com - Youtube's sole purpose is to allow people to view videos posted by other people and it achieves that.  The simplicity of the website works to its advantage because it is easy to navigate and with the simple color pallet it works well.

Website where there is not obvious clickable areas

Website where it is obvious where to click

Wikipedia.com - Really not a big debacle about this one, the good ole blue link buttons are evident enough of what is clickable or not which is genius if you think about it.

Website not split up into clearly defined areas

MLB.com - The website is simple and it gets right to the point but when you scroll down all of the parts have the same background color and they all blend together at first glance.  Only when you look around you notice they're meant to be separate sections.

Website clearly split up into defined areas

ESPN.com - Unlike MLB.com, ESPN is physically split up into different sections where the viewer can clearly see where the section begins and ends.  It is very streamlined and organized and well put together.

Website that uses good conventions

Website that makes good use of visual hierarchies 

Apple.com - What Apple does good with their website is that they make it very simple with a white background and sans serif fonts and a sort of grey style color scheme.  When there is a big announcement they need to make they just upload a huge picture with a loud background and that will capture the attention of of the viewer right away.

Let Me Educate You on: Wordpress

     Wordpress is a database based website creator and produce.  They will help you create a website for free and host it in their database for free.  If you're looking for an easy way to make and maintain a website, Wordpress is for you.

   

WordPress.com 

There are two sites that you can use to create a website.  The first one is Wordpress.com.  This is if you want to create a site in the Wordpress database hosted by Wordpress.com

WordPress.org

If you want to download the application and host the database on your own computer you go to this site and download it for free.  This allows you more hosting freedom and the ability to host bigger sites.

The Best Sites for Stock Images

     Images are a big component for creating a solid website.  Pictures make the website more interesting which draws more attention to the website.  Getting these pictures can be somewhat challenging due to copyright laws and trademarks.  Stock images are free images that anyone can use.  In this post I will go over four sites that offer stock images on Africa.  This is what I found for each website I used.

Gratisography

Pexels

Unsplash

Morgefile

     All of the pictures came out to be nice and crisp from all of the websites.  My favourite picture came from Unsplash.  The lion looks really cool in the tree and the branches are at the 1/3rd mark on each side.  I found the most photos on morgefile.  There were pages upon pages of photos you can choose from and there were a wide selection of topics.  There wasn't a standout website that was the best to navigate, all of them were fairly simple to find what you needed.

Gratisography
Pro: Photos that can be used for a lot of different sites
Con: You can't search for pictures and there are not that many.

Pexels
Pro:
Con:

Unsplash
Pro:
Con:

Morgefile
Pro:
Con:

Final Blog Post (For Now)

     I have updated my index page.  Thats right, you can now see what I've been doing for the semester.  I can tell you it hasn't just been watching baseball!
What I did was that I added all of the extra links to my webpage and spaced out my link to my blog from my other websites in order to create that differential between the two.  To check out my blog, just click here.  I left it without a picture because I thought that the simplistic look of this would be enough.  I have a picture waiting on deck if need be.

This is my index page.

My favourite project from the entire year would probably have to be my FIBA 14 basketball site.  I got the freedom of choice on what I was able to make it on and how we had a lot of time to make it.  I am proud of how it came out and even though I had problems with time management I got it done in time and later in in the year I worked on that website being responsive as well.

    Over the summer I plan to gain muscle mass and kind of body build.  I need to get a wee bit bigger and a whole hell of a lot stronger.  Plus, I don't like being so skinny.  On the 31st of May im going down to the Florida Keys and on June 13th im flying out to Boston.  Other than that, im just gonna sleep and enjoy the summer! 

The Office Parody

    Great Value is a film about a group of students plan out and shoot a water bottle commercial.  The director of the group Ben is portrayed as a know how been there done that before kind of person.  He is very bossy and control oriented and will not take any ideas.

    There were several problems in the beginning of the film.  Everyone in the group had different ideas in what they wanted to do for the film.  Anton did the storyboard and I wrote the script.  With my issues with time constraints, I finished the script one day later than I was supposed to.  When we initially started filming, things went rather smoothly.  Once we got into the middle stages however, our personalities started to clash a little bit.  In my opinion, Anton who was the director was being a little too controlling and just wasn't having fun with the process.  Granted yes, me and Matt could've focused a little more but what's the point in filming if your not going to have fun with it?  Anyway, our group did finish filming on time and got the editing down and turned in.

    Overall, I think this was a fun class.  I'm not going to take video next year but I learned a lot.  I made a lot of new friends and people.  Its too bad that this year was one of the worse years of school.  I knew both Cady and Cierra so that hit me pretty hard and I think with the stress of being so young and holding a job really  took its toll.

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Short Film

Responsive Design on the Web

   Responsive Design is a technique that web designers use to make a website look good not only on an ordinary computer screen but also on a tablet or a smartphone.  In my last blog post, I explained that the number of mobile users are increasing at a steady rate each year so as a web designer, it is important to make my site look appealing on a mobile device as well as a computer because more and more people around the world are beginning to use their smart phone to access the web.
 
   To make a website responsive, one must simply edit the CSS and insert media queries.  Media Queries are guidelines the website follows to tell how big to make certain parts of the site so if I am viewing a website with the resolution of 1024x768 the banner image will be one size but I'm looking at the same site on my mobile phone with the resolution of 468x360 the banner image will be much smaller and the picture itself may even be different.  The points where the CSS triggers these changes are called breakpoints
Lets take a look at an example of responsive design

 Here is a screenshot of website from the UK.  Goofy right?  Stuff and Nonsense is actually a site where you can send your own website in to them and they will help you make your site responsive.  Right now, the screen is at its biggest and what do we see?  The banner image expands through the page and covers up a lot of the screen.  The text in body and the menu bar are fairly large and spread out.


Now lets shrink the screen a little bit...

What happened?  Well, as the screen got smaller and squeezed the banner image so that it takes up more space on the page.  If you notice, the image changed as well.  Nothing else really changed with the text and the menu besides the fact that it just got smaller but proportion wise, nothing really changed .





And even smaller...

The biggest change happens when the screen is shrunk to its smallest.  The banner image changed once again and the menu bar disappeared.  This version is simpler and throws all of the important information at the viewer right away because most people that visit websites on their mobile phones want to quickly search for the info they need rather than look through the page.

Desktop vs. Mobile; Global Trends

   From the beginning of the school year in 2012 to the 12th of March in 2015 the number of mobile users increased from 20,379 users to 44,359 users.  That's an increase of 23,980 in just three years.  So what?  This shows the steady increase of people that are using their mobile phones to access the web than desktop computers and laptops.  

Interview- Stockton Grunwald

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Informal Interview with Makenzie Votaw

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