Advanced Web Design

Click the Kuler image below for final design, this will pop out in a new window.

Description

The aim of this unit is to enable students to investigate new developments in advanced web design and the production of new content and delivery methods. Broadband technology allows the delivery of multimedia in many new exciting ways, this unit will allow students to follow new developments and to produce a range of work that will reflect contemporary working methods. Interactive television, hand held devices and the internet utilise converging pathways and there is a common acceptance of multimedia as an enhancement of traditional communications forms. It is intended that students will be able to follow these developments and explore new ways of working to ensure they are ready to meet expected changes within the industry.

Brief

Content is now massively distributed, individuals and companies now disperse their video, graphics, text across the likes of ‘youtube’, ‘flickr’ and ‘facebook’. How do you organise and structure such content?

Task

Using the relevant, api (explain) pull data such as music tastes, video lists and friend’s lists from sources such as ‘youtube’, ‘flickr’ and ‘facebook’ and create a single page to display them. Your page should be an aesthetic and structured interpretation of the data retrieved that gives the user a visual understanding of the information and the relationships between its component parts.

Write Up

I am pleased with my final outcome because I stuggled with the workings (code) of how it works but I over came my difficulties and produced a simply yet effective piece. Once I had the tricky part sorted out, which was the code I was easily able to sort out the colour patterns and shapes of my work. You can see all my experiments on my blog, by clicking the link in the red box above. I tried changing the shape from squares to circles and so on to see what would look best. To achieve the word effect that I did above, I made it in Photoshop, then cut out the words and saved as a transparent png. I then put it on the top layer in Flash and the colours just change in the background.

The colours are actually being loaded in from an external location that is being updated on a daily basis, so that the colours are always totally random which I liked the idea of, this means that it is always different. The colours are being pulled into flash from the Adobe Kuler website via RSS feeds. I used more than one feed to make it completely random.

With the research stages in my project I was unsure what I wanted to do for a long time but it all has one thing in common which is that I wanted to keep it simply, what ever I did. I didn't want to overcomplicate it as I was not that confident in coding with Flash and good designs are often simple ideas.

In all I enjoyed this project, it was challenging to learn new things but I think it always is. With my final piece there are a few issues but I'm happy it works, sometimes if you leave it running for a long time it has a knack of crashing your internet browser or computer, I'm not sure why this happens. It also takes a while to load up all the colours but I guess thats because it is loading in from an external source.