Futuristic Fonts?

Fig 1. Induction font

Fig 2.Checkbook font

The fonts used in my webpage is going to be absolutely important. I'm using a futuristic/sci-fiction theme, so i'm going to use some futuristic fonts.

I've downloaded some sci-fi and futuristic font to experiment with and there are 2 I like: checkbook and induction. These are just free fonts you can download off the net. I will use checkbook for sub-headings and induction for the main title of the webpage called "MINISITE 2".

However firefox and explorer don't recognise these fonts, unless all users in the world has this particular custom font. So therefore I would have to type these fonts up in photoshop and save them as an raster image.

Navigation Aesthetics : Star Bullet points

As mentioned previously before, I was considering how to increase the aesthetics of a navigation menu. At this stage, I'm going to use a image star to use as bullet points for menu items. I think it looks neat.

I made this star in illustrator. I also tried exporting it to photoshop and add a bevel and emboss effect. It looks pretty good, but when i tried that on the website, it looked weird because the star looked 3D and it didn't really suit the 2D-ness and colour theme of my website, so I reverted back to using the original orange star.

Minisite 2: Progression

I'm still working on my minisite 2. So far I had to re-learn CSS from scratch and it took forever...(echo-ing)

Yeah, but I must say, my tag muscle has beefed up and I'm glad I went through that hard training. Now I know how to use the "div id" tags in the html document in conjunction with the css file.

In my minisite 2 so far, I've got the header, main body background, text and the navigation menu. Soon I will put image documentation of my project to assiociate with those links. Here's how it looks so far (see above)

Users will be able to navigate through the website by hovering their mouse over the menu. I wanted to use this other way of creating a menu, but it was quite differcult at this stage, because it requires nested layers. Perhaps I will do that for minisite 3.

Even though the website looks simple, it took me like 4 days to set up all the images and links to work right. It required a lot of trial and error, because there was a lot of coding problems. For example, the menu would disappear into now where until I set the left and top location and position to be absolute.

Production Documentation: final concept design

Using the previous inspirational images I aquired online, I came up with a creative looking robot CD stand.(Look at above sketch)

The Robot will be medieval in nature, because it's appearance will suggest so. The robot will hold a shield which will incorporate the custom CD case. Users will be able to slide the CD slot out from the shield and get the CD out or in.

Weapon:
In terms of appearance, the robot will use a chinese Halbard which the chinese hero Guan Yu uses in combat. It comprised of a long pole with a extremely large cresent-shaped blade attached to the top.

Face:
It will have eyes of a cylon shown in figure 6. It is a red horizontal strip. It looks sinister that way.It will also have a face mask plate hiding and guarding it's nose and mouth.

Body:

The body will be somewhat medieval english knight looking. It will have a simple body with a chest plate armour and shoulder pads displaying the holy cross.

Flags:
In figure 5 of the previous documentation, it illustrates a model of a japanese samurai on a horse. He is bearing a large tall banner on his back which represents his clan. I will use this idea and apply it to my robot and the flags will illustrate the different sub-assignments within that subject.

I will now attempt to work out the scale and dimensions of the robot parts including width, height, breath and angle of it's legs, arms, body, head etc...These dimensions will be the basis for my construction.

Product documentation continued...IV

I've been doing some more experimenting with form and functionality with the ambitious robot CD stand. I've found some inspirational images which I would like to fuse and incorporate into my design.

Images shown below:


Figure 1: Guan Yu, (Famous Warrior of the 3 chinese dynasties)



Figure 2: Guan Yu on horse with chinese halbard



Figure 3:Medieval Knight in Armour



Figure 4: Medieval European Knight Helmet Armour



Figure 5: Japanese Samurai on Horse with banner on back

These are the inspirational images I will use to design my CD stand.

Stay tuned...

Product documentation continued...III

Today, I found recovered some concept sketches of my CD stand product in my sketch diary. As you can see from the sketches, I was playing around with some forms and I was also endeavouring to explore how I can integrate the functionality of a CD slot case into the form of a mechanical being known as a robot.

In the first sketch, I concentrated on form and I was trying to sketch a military robot model called "MADCAT". It is derived from a popular computer game titled "Mechwarriors" and the MADCAT is one of the most popular mechwarriors in the series. This is because of it's size, the stylish way it moves, it's ability to mount multi-missle launcher and of course it's cool name. However there was no interesting way of mounting a Mini-CD case within the robot unless the CD robot stand was massively huge like a monument.



In the 2nd Sketch, I focussed on trying to figure out how to fit a CD slot into the robot form. I remember from the Mechwarrior PC game, there was one mechwarrior which had large round arms (I forgot it's model name) and I was thinking of slotting a mini-CD case into it's shoulder-arm joint. I did some 1:1 scale calculations on paper and since a mini CD-stand is roughly 8cm, this would make the shoulder-arm joint massive. Therefore I would have scale up the size of the entire robot body, but that would make the size of the body huge too! This would be inappropriate as a CD stand, since it's going to hold 1 mini-CD anyway. Therefore this idea isn't really feasible.

Wk8: Rich Media

Yesterday, We learnt why people embed videos, movies or some form of flash animation into webpages. It's because those forms of media are very effective in delievring a message to the public. The message can be promotional or propadganda or even news.

But sometimes flash animations regularly used for advertising on websites can be pretty annoying, because animation repeatedly flickers or it affect a user's online web browsing experience. These days, sometimes users aren't given much control on whether they want to see the advertisement media or not on how much of it.

In lab, I successfully completed two exercises.
1) Embed a simple flash file(swf) into a html document.
2) Embed a video file (mpeg)

For 1)
I had to use the jump.swf file justin gave us to take advantage of the variable 'path'in _loadmovie(data.path,0) to link to any flash file i made. The "0" didn't work, so I changed it to "this" so it becomes_loadmovie(data.path,this) and it worked.

For 2)
The video file was slightly different. Similarly I had to use the object tag, but I also had to use the embed tag and link it to the video file on the local drive. After that, I used the quicktime plugin and experimented with the parameters to understand how embedding videos on webpages work.

Minisite 2 Preparation Part 1

I've been so busy and stressed with other uni work to blog regularly. My fault for doing 30 credit points. :(

Anyway, I've started preparing for minisite 2. Minisite 2 should focus more on CSS, because my previous website was pretty basic. I've already started browsing through CSS Zengarden to check out other people's design work. It's pretty impressive and it has given me some inspiration and motivation.

I've thought about the layout and navigation of the minisite. [work in progress]

Minisite 1 self-review

As I said before, minisite 1 look pretty bland. The layout structure is basic, with the menu on the left and body of the information in the middle. To fit the theme of my previous project, I added a image of gundam robots at the top of the website. Hopefully this will add some vibrancy to the webpage.

When I click on a link on the menu on the left of the page, it scrolls down to the particular topic quickly. I did this by using the (a href and a name) anchor tags. This will allow the user to effciency find what the want to read, especially if there is a lot of infomation going down the page. However, presentation wise, placing all information and images on one page is not very efficient. I think i'd rather have seperate xhtml index files to seperate different categories. Perhaps I will explore this more in depth later on for minisite 2.

Deco2102 site and Minisite Uploaded

Last thursday, I uploaded 3 websites related to this subject.

1) www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~pelu9930
This allows the users to access my refined general homepage and therefore give the user the option of entering subject specific website such as Deco2102 and Deco1008 etc.

2) www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~pelu9930/deco2102

This is the main webpage for this site. It contains visual links to the minisites, blog, and back to homepage. I used photoshop, illustrator to design the visual background.

3) www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~pelu9930/deco2102/minisite1/

This minisite is the first iteration of my previous past project and it an xhtml document with CSS. At the moment I think the website aesthetics look pretty bland, but it's functional enough at this stage of the iteration.