Well, I’ve been a bit bummed by the lack of widgets for commenting. I may need to do something myself in html. So far the best thing I have found is Echo, which cost $12/year. It’s not even that great looking.

I also tried finding the best looking/most conducive blog platform, but blogs are really set up to display posts, not comments. The best I could find on wordpress is this: http://beautymyth.wordpress.com/. Again, not exactly the look and feel I was going for.

On the bright side, I think add this will adequately link the site to facebook. I’ve used add this for other sites I’ve worked on. Everyone, it rocks.

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Your digital work is very illustrative, a seemingly natural progression of your fine art. What were the hurdles in shifting mediums? Was the addition of digital media driven by the market or pure interest? Your formal education is painting. How did you learn the technical necessities to produce digital work?
Allen Wyke

What do you want or expect from a designer when you are collaborating on a project together? What are the deliverables you generally receive, and what is standard in the industry? What are some examples of technology-driven strategies you’ve seen or worked on that were innovative, effective, and outside-the-box?

1. navigation framework and site layout looking good

2. click through idea of what a functioning site would look like

3. ability for “i heart me” button to function and link with the pledge counter on the upper right side of the site

4. users able to click on image to guess where image retouched

5. score to actually function

6. comments linked within site enabled

I hope we have more critiques in the upcoming few weeks, to get feedback on the aesthetics of our projects. Designing for the web is so new to me, and doing things like using gradients is completely outside of my comfort zone. I love hand-crafted aesthetics, as well as collages, and I have been really challenging myself in this class to simplify everything and reduce the noise to have a simple, easy-to-understand user experience.

One thing that I notice I really struggle with when designing for the web is developing the header and navigation, and choosing the size of the site. It was helpful to get feedback about my site…which not so surprisingly addressed the heavy black bars, as well as the alignment.

I did a redesign without these heavy black bars, pictured below:

I had abandoned the embed idea, where users could copy and past code to place the game into their site, but I would like to bring it back, and next the game in a holder like so:

At this point, I have been looking at the framing of the site for so long, that I can’t even see objectively what is better, or if this redesign is an improvement. However, I want the photos to be the main focal point, so keeping the rest light hopefully will make this the first thing users look at.

I also appreciated the feedback about including men in the game. I found 2 wild stallions to add to the line-up:

With the men, I now have 11 images, which I don’t think is too much, but I’m interested to hear if users would prefer to cap it at 10.

It’s a delicate balance dealing with the technical side of flash and the aesthetic side of new media. The technical stuff is so overwhelming to me that I have been dedicating hours to watching video tutorials on GoToAndLearn, so I appreciated the time spent critiquing not the technical function of my beta project but the aesthetics.

MoMa’s Color Chart.  I love the bottom navigation, and this could work well on my beta project.

Before & After is an interactive game aimed at educating its audience (mainly young women) about photo retouching. The game consists of 10 sets of images: an original photo and its retouched version.  Users are invited to find the differences between the photos, and are then shown the differences they missed. Each difference is explained so that the user can train his or her eye.

The game is nested within a web site called Beauty Myth (www.beautymyth.com). The site explains concept behind the game, offers a comments page, and hosts the e-pledge (to stop comparing self to images of models) and pledge counter. The Before & After game has an embed option where users can copy code to embed the game into their sites for free.

Use scenario:

Helen is a college senior who loves fashion magazines and shopping. She came across an article about a site called Beauty Myth and decided to check it out. The site opened up with a game called Before & After, and she went ahead a played. The 10 minutes that it took wizzed by. Even though she scored super low, she didn’t care. The game pointed out where models skin had been smoothed, boobs made bigger, and freckles removed by photo retouchers. She had no idea images were that different after retouching! She had always felt she hadn’t measured up, but felt so much more attractive after playing the game. She left a comment on the site, and found that there were tons of comments from other girls just like her that had no idea that even the best looking celebrities and models were retouched. She took the anonymous pledge on the site to not compare herself to these images since in fact, they were more like photo-paintings than photographs!

I think I’m going to have to not only design the game but also a site for the game to be nested in. Some examples of the frame work:

In addition to the logotypes of Vogue and NY Time’s T Magazine, I found the logos below. Overall, I noticed that logos of women’s magazines and of beauty companies avoid icons, and are very simple, straight-forward logotypes of an unaltered or slightly altered font.

Tutorials that may help in my Beta project:

1. drag & drop code: http://www.flashandmath.com/basic/dragdroptour/index.html

2. pop-up buttons: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=67

3. preloader: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=18

4. score: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngvjqa7HWaM