Usability Tests

The issues that came up during the usability testing for 10 rolls of film and a bit more:

• At the site's Home page, one user was tempted to click on an element that wasn't linked to a page
• The sound clip found on the next to the last page wasn't clearly labeled
• The navigational menu along the top of the site wasn't clearly distinguished
• All users noted that there was no contact information in case they wanted information about the artists
• When viewing the galleries, the photos' labels were not immediately recognized
•  At the site's Home page, I had a shooting arrow directing users to the galleries, but one user found it distracting

Overall, the users' experience was positive, save for a few technical issues which I have since corrected.

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) is a web design tool that "aims to cut down on your development time" by providing the user with "a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing."

Entheos (http://www.entheosweb.com/) offers website templates, custom Web design, and free resources. Just to test it, I clicked on 'Flash animated' under the 'Templates' tab. There are 631 flash animated templates to choose from, ranging in price from $25 to $69. I only clicked on a couple of the pages, so the price might go up, or down, depending on the template.  

Design Tool & Design Web Page

For those who want to make a tartan for their website, Tartan Maker (http://www.tartanmaker.com/?page=index) is the web design tool for you. If you know color wheel codes by heart, or even if you don't, you can get pretty creative with different tartan designs.


Like Wix, Webs.com (http://www.webs.com/) allows users to create their own websites for free. It houses more than 300 "professionally-designed, customizable templates", however if you wish to have access to increased web and video storage capacity, and Google and Facebook adwords, it costs. The least expensive Starter package goes for a monthly fee of $3.75; the $7.75 is the cost of the Enhanced package, and the Pro package costs $16.66. 

Design Tool & Design Web Page

My Fonts: What The Font (http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) is a web design tool that let's users search for a font they may recognize by sight, but not by name.

Notepad.com (http://notepad.com/) offers basic design help. It has a cool little turquoise colored character, complete with stylin' sunglasses, and goatee. The site offers a list of helpful tutorials on how to apply HTML tags, codes, and tables, among other things, such as information on just what HTML is and how it works.

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Brusheezy (http://www.brusheezy.com/) provides free Photoshop brushes for users building a website, but the site also encourages artists to contribute and discuss their work, creating a sort of artists forum. 

Finer Design (http://www.finerdesign.com/) is a Web design and development site. With it's clean, sophisticated look, and extensive portfolio, it looks to be a well-established site. 

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Wonderwebware (http://wonderwebware.com/), is a web design tools site that offers, among other free tools, a screen ruler that allows the designer to measure in pixels, millimeters, centimeters, and inches. There is a screen capture utility, and a tool that converts text to HTML. It's a pretty straightforward site without a lot of frills.

Web Studio 5.0 (http://www.webstudio.com/), is a design web page site that offers a 30-day free trial, which includes access to all of the sites features and functions, tutorials, tech support, and hosting "so you and others can see your website on the internet." A seven-minute video provides a quick tour of how to use the site. It's all point and click and seems fairly easy to use.

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Quick Step Design (http://www.quickstepdesign.com/) is "the easy way to Design Banners and Signs." There is a "how it works" button in the navigation menu to guide the user through the process of creating a poster, sign, banner, or sticker. Once the user completes their design, they have the choice to email the design, send it to Twitter, or get a print quote.


A1 Web Design Co. (http://www.a1co.com/) boasts that "when you order a web site from A1 Web Design, (you) receive a One Year Domain Registration and One Year of Website Hosting absolutely FREE!" Everything else costs. A lot. I figure they must be excellent Web page designers, though you can't really tell it from their own plain-Jane page. However, they do provide a portfolio of their work, which consists of thumbnail images of their clients' websites. They look impressive enough, but it would have been nice to be able to click on the image and be taken to the site.

CC pp 250-270

Throughout the book, Jenkins argues that the media model of the passive consumer is not and should no longer be the standard by which the consumer is judged. He uses many examples to prove his point, like the rise, and fall, of Howard Dean in the 2004 primaries, Al Gore's 'Current' television station, and a group of "female consumers frustrated by their historical neglect or patronizing treatment by the comics industry" called Sequential Tarts, to demonstrate how powerful consumer participation can be. The old media model focused on the individual, but the new convergence culture allows for a "politics of participation" that "starts from the assumption that we have greater collective bargaining power if we form consumption communities." 


That said, he recognizes that not everyone is on equal footing with the convergence of media. He dedicates the next to the last paragraph of the chapter to discussing the consumer's responsibility to be educated in "media literacy" because, typically, "media are read primarily as threats rather than as resources." I found that interesting, particularly because he followed that up with an insight about parents lacking the skills to "help their kids build a meaningful relationship with media", though they were well-versed in limiting how much media their child consumed.  

Desing Tool & Design Web Page

According to Google, Typetester's (http://www.typetester.org/) "primary role is to make (a) web designer's life easier." It's first page has three column, each with drop down menus allowing the user to choose a typeface, font size, and alignment. There are a few other choices, but I didn't quite understand what they meant. Tracking and leading, anyone? A user can also try out a background color as well as color for the text. Overall, it's a pretty neat tool.


Silverleaf Design (http://www.silverlf.com/) is a Web development services website. It's straightforward in it's setup and even includes a clever 61-page guide of "basic facts" to inform those who are unfamiliar with web design how "to understand... information about our online lives."

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Free Buttons (http://www.freebuttons.com/) is a tools site that offers up 54 free button styles to add to your website. It is easy to navigate, with the button styles being placed front and center; they're also listed in the navigation menu on the upper left side of the page. Some of the button choices, like 'Star Wars' are a bit cheesy, but the 'Ufo' one kind of makes up for that.

Acme Web Design (http://acme-web-design.info/free-tools.php) offers several free tools which they claim "you won't find anywhere else". They also offer help to design your website, tips for hosting a website, and tutorials. It's a user friendly site and has a cool logo you have to see for yourself. 

CC pp 217-250

In this chapter, "Photoshop for Democracy", Jenkins aims to focus "on changes in communications systems and cultural norms." He writes that the "new media operate with different principles than the broadcast media that dominated American politics for so long: access, participation, reciprocity, and peer-to-peer rather than one-to-many communication." As with most anything, there are positive and negative aspects that come along with such change. For example, bloggers can frame themselves as traditional journalists, and  comedians parodying network news can find an audience who finds them to be more reliable than the network news. 

This chapter was interesting because, though Jenkins references the 2004 elections for being the "period of innovation and experimentation in the use of new media technologies and popular-culture-based strategies", the 2008 election is the one that stands out for me as the one to have wrenched every ounce of use from the new media, particularly the social sites like Facebook. 

Design Tool & Design Web Page

99 Designs (http://www.99designs.com/) is a website that specializes in "logo design, web design, and more." The site includes a clever one-minute video that tells users how the site works, and the services they offer. The site's navigation menu, which lists examples of products they create designs for, echoes the information shared in the video. 99 Designs is not a particularly flashy site, but it is visually interesting enough with the black screen for the video being surrounded by a muted gray background, and splashed of red in their logo, the 'Get started now' button.

Callahan.com (http://www.callihan.com/webtools/) is a web tools site "where you can find free, affordable, and professional Web design software tools for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix/Linux." The page consists of three columns, with the middle one being the largest as it contains the hyperlinks to the Web tools, some of which include HTML and text editors, and graphics and image editing tools. The tools are also found to the left of the tool list in a small navigational menu. 

CC pp 134-216

This chapter explores how involved fans become with a product, be it a film or a book, and the different ways in which they grow the mythology of those films and books. Many do it by creating fictional online universes where they role play as their favorite characters; some go so far as to film their own versions of their favorite movies; and still others, perhaps dissatisfied with a book's ending, rewrite it to suit their views of what should have happened. 


Jenkins writes of how these fans can be both a blessing and a curse to the companies marketing these products: "...the media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued properties...", yet, "at the same time, they are terrified of what happens if this consumer power gets out of control." George Lucas worries that because of the glut of amateur works floating about on the Web, future projects (I can't find the section to quote it) may be subject to legal action for usurping someone else's idea. While I see his point, it's sort of ludicrous,because the mythology of the story is nothing new, and no matter how original 'Star Wars' was and is, it's specialness lay in it's special effects, not because it was a story that had never before been told.


The next chapter deals with fan fiction - specifically, Harry Potter - and the struggle for fan fiction writers to have the right to express themselves on the Web. 


Jenkins says that the "current notion of fair use is an artifact of an era when few people had access to the marketplace of ideas." It's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle once it's been let loose. 

CC pp 59-134

Reading about zappers, casuals, and loyals, I recognize that I'm a mix of a zapper and a loyal; I don't see the point of tuning in to something as a casual would, only to be dusting, vacuuming, or painting while it's on, but the reason I identify with a zapper is because, for all the advertiser's Herculean effort, I zap or mute to rid myself of the commercials. Geico, I have come to despise you... I am a loyal viewer because, once I tune in to something, I generally watch it until the end.


As for cult films and their attraction, Jenkins writes that "The cult film is made to be quoted, (Umberto) Eco contends, because it is made from quotes, archetypes, allusions, and references drawn from a range of previous works." True, there is nothing new under the sun, as the old saying goes, but isn't that the inspiration to do better, to improve upon that which came before? 

CC pp 1-58

What I found particularly interesting in the reading was when the author wrote in the introduction about feeling challenged in writing the book because "everything seems to be changing at once and there is no vantage point that takes me above the fray." Later, in chapter one, in discussing t.v. reality show spoilers and how they obtain the information no one supposedly has access to, he writes: "Imagine the kinds of information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil the government rather than the networks." It looks like this book was copyrighted in 2006, so it seems that his original concern with the speed of change and then the spoiling of government business is now proven with Julian Assange's sharing of government secrets on Wikileaks. I just thought that was creepily interesting.

Design Tool & Design Web Page

Since we just covered color in chapter 8 of Document Design, the 4096 Color Wheel is a great tool. It suggests color schemes that are web-safe, web-smart, and unsafe. 
(http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html)


A design web page I found is Steve's free website templates (http://www.steves-templates.com/); all the templates he makes available aren't free, though.   

Logo/Vignettes

This is my logo.

This is my red eye before.

This is my red eye after.

This is my before sepia tone photo.

This is my after sepia tone photo.

This is my before selective colorization photo.

This is my after selective colorization photo.

I'd like to give a big shout out to YouTube because the Gimp tutorials were pretty useless... Grr.

DD 8-9 - Color/Lists, Tables, and Forms

There is a lot to take in in chapter 8. I understand the importance of color to design, but I didn't find all the information about brightness, luminance, value, saturation, and hue particularly interesting; I found the examples the authors gave on the colored pages to be more informative, including their explanation of Ethanol's blue and green logo and how it effectively implies "clean air and water" and "the fields where the farmers grow the corn used to make ethanol." Also, understanding how to pair colors by using colors opposite from one another on the color wheel, by using triadic and tetradic color schemes, or by using monochromatic and analogous color schemes was useful.


Chapter 9 discusses lists, tables, and forms - tools that have been in use forever. Clearly, the organization of data is key for the ease of users to understand the information put before them, so similarity, contrast, alignment, proximity, order, and enclosure are important principles for the designer to follow.

Blog Banners

DD 7 - Graphics

A few of the highlights in this chapter on Graphics are: 


When used effectively, Graphics impact the user by providing information, and depending on the goal of the client, it may even persuade the user to buy a product. 


The authors write that "One of the most challenging aspects of communicating through Graphics is to present a clear and accurate idea of the information or ideas." In order to do that, the designer must know the user well and use the principles of similarity, contrast, alignment, proximity, order, and enclosure.


The chapter also discusses the importance of ethics in creating Graphics that don't "mislead users with graphics, whether intentionally or unintentionally."

DD 5 - Pages

According to the authors, "One of the most challenging and dynamic tasks a document designer will undertake is page design", which involves the strategic and consistent placement of "text, heading, and images." To do that, the document designer must consider how users view and use the pages they view. Do they skim, scan, or read?


In designing the page, "the key for designers is to capture the users attention." That is where the principles of order, similarity, contrast, alignment, and proximity come in to "create a sense of flow."


Beyond the single page document, using grids is an effective way to design a document. Grids allow for a "consistent, yet flexible ready system." Looking at the examples in the book, I find grids to be a more appealing design, particularly since "users typically prefer to read lines of text about 7 to 12 words long." I'm more inclined to read something, and be more engaged by it if it doesn't look like a big block of tedium.


I thought the example of the mutual fund prospectus was interesting, because while I understand their use of the no frills design, if I were a customer, I would likely be clueless as to what was going on with my investment. The book talked about the inability to read the inside margins correctly; I probably wouldn't have made it that far to test if I could read it or not because just the look of the document alone was enough to put me off.  


All in all, this was a far more interesting chapter than the previous ones.

DD 4 - The Whole Document

This chapter focuses on how to design an entire document while "thinking not only about two-dimensional layout, colors, typefaces, and so on, but also about how the document will perform as a physical, three-dimensional object in a particular environment." No matter how users interact with the completed document, whether it be a manual, booklet, or a sign, the same old principles of perception, culture, and rhetoric apply. 


The chapter also delves into formatting. Deciding how to format relies upon the designers knowledge of their client's rhetorical purpose for the document, as well as the level of design and cost, while for the user, longevity and conditions of use are important.

DD 3 - Theories of Design

The chapter begins with the sentence: "Sometimes visual design seems simple." From my standpoint - the standpoint of someone who has never considered all that goes into designing a website - this is true, but after reading what goes into the thought process to conceive of how best to formulate a site, there's lot's more to it than a clever banner, an artsy or plain background, and ease of use. 


This chapter focused on how to visually approach a document by using perception to attract, culture to explain, and rhetoric to persuade. The example the book gave of the museum leaflet geared toward kids effectively demonstrated all three of those theories. The designer of the leaflet used vivid colors to attract his audience, used magnifying glasses - a cultural touch associated with being a detective - and rhetoric to engage the kids in solving a mystery. 


Though Gestalt laws of perception seem to be the standard that document designers subscribe to, the authors point out that "other explanations of perception have something to add to our understanding as well."


I have to say, all the neurophysiology talk made my neurons hurt...

Design Tool & Design Web Page 28

The design tool I found was the site search at http://www.bravenet.com/?afilid=47985953. It allows visitors to search the web as well as your site. It's also a way for you to keep tabs on what visitors to your site are looking for by the phrases they use. I think it might be the single most important tool to include on a website, particularly if the site is sales oriented.


The design web page I found was http://www.wpdfd.com/, Webpage Design for Designers. It's a nice looking site all on it's own. It's easy to peruse, and it includes web design articles, design resources, featured designs, web design forums, and tools and software - although those software downloads are trial versions.  


p.s. I also stumbled upon a cool site for cropping pictures, http://www.picresize.com/; it's free, too.

DD 1-2

Chapter 1


The idea that "The first person who carved an arrow into a tree trunk to mark a path for travelers was an information designer" is a unique way to think about all the symbols, pictures, words, and documents that inundate daily living "so much so that at times they seem to be invisible." It's easy to discount early communication as primitive, but at its heart, that arrow met the challenges set forth in this book for successful document design, I think: Communicate in a complex, inter-cultural world of technology and community; analyze human communication situations to create documents that solve human problems.


Chapter 2


It's not surprising all the tricks that information designers have to use to create pathos and ethos in what they create, but using them effectively by employing the six principles of design, takes skill. 

PC pp 51-56

Limiting yourself to two fonts, and using a sans serif (a term I had to look up, because though I've seen the word, I never knew there was a difference between it and serif) for headings and serif for the text of the piece.

I don't know if it's just me, but the Helvetica/Avant Garde competition didn't look like a competition to me. I liked Avant Garde better than Helvetica because I like more rounded letters. To me the fonts looked very different, but then I don't have a typesetter's eye.

PC pp 25-40

Trying to figure out that puzzle gave me a bit of a headache. I'm a little ashamed to say that I didn't figure out the proverbs, but I get the point the author was making about using all caps and the inability to tell them apart.

I like to play around with different fonts, though I have an affinity for art deco shapes; I'm not sure why, but the idea that someone would use all caps with a calligraphy type font, boggles the mind.

Tech bio

Hi,

Welcome to my blog. Pardon me while I shiver in horror… Okay, feeling a bit better now. So, our assignment for class is to write about our experiences with technology. Here goes…

I own a computer, I own a cell phone. I use them like I use a fork and spoon: they are beneficial to my life, but not essential to it—or so I like to think. Truthfully, though, there have been days that I’ve gone without speaking to or texting anyone on my phone, and I have even gone a day, or so without hopping on my computer the minute I wake up. Really. Course I’m on the computer practically all day at my job, so maybe that’s not much to crow about, but still… While I have a basic knowledge of how to work most technology, an in depth understanding of how most technology works—such as their innards (Mother what?) and their myriad of uses (because I’m sure my computer can do more than just play YouTube videos of Bon Qui Qui at King Burger, or a cute rat lovin’ on a cute cat)—are mostly beyond me. Folk who take computers apart for fun have my utmost respect because if I did that, the resulting image would be one of me surrounded by a heap of screws, wires, and some other terribly important stuff, clueless, with my top lip bent out of shape in a scowl, or maybe frustrated tears falling to mingle with a runner of snot as I sob pitifully and wonder how I’m expected to do the jigsaw puzzle on Shockwave without my trusty HP.

Having said that, my experiences using technology have been mostly positive. For example, I don’t have to waste gas and time driving to the bank to transfer money from one account to another; I don’t have to waste gas and time driving to Office Depot to buy printer ink or paper; I don’t have to waste gas and time driving clear across town to Old Navy to get that $25 pair of jeans that promise to lift and shape my butt. Because of the wonders of modern technology, I can do all that and more with a click of my mouse. Now, while I do shop online a lot, I have yet to fall prey to the wiles of Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social networking doodads; I just don’t find myself so interesting as to warrant a minute by minute, blow by blow update of me frying up some eggs or the like. I don’t know. Maybe I need to broaden my horizons.

A.