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thegord

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 24, 2006
51
0
test site
its for my artwork. critique away.. i need it, i know how the online community does not hold back. there is still much to be done but i thought i would get some thoughts from others in the process. im still learning the ins and outs of code, but wouldnt mind to make not so ordinary sites for people if need be. let me know what you's think -Gord
 
It's pretty cool. Reminds me of Sly Racoon for some reason.

Maybe the gallery bit could be bigger, it's a little overwhelmed by all the framing elements, and it's what i'm there to see(?)
and I'm getting "undefined" in the little info window underneath the 1/7 etc for most of them.

I like the interactive head thing, although it wasn't til i read the Info that i knew to click on it

The font is nice for headings, but a little wearying for body text

and "coming soon" unless you meant comming..
 
yea i was going to make the frame a little bigger cause that is mostly the focus on the site, i did think about the type as well cause it does get a little blurred and hard to read at smaller fonts.
 
dig it,

first off, nice work! *bookmarks site*

you should definitely allow users to blow up your work a little, I feel that your example sizes work great for thumbnails.

maybe play around with the position and prominence of your back button for your galleries. it felt like it needed to stand out just a bit more. i had some "sticking" problems with your example navigation.

the headers are great, are you displaying any of your work? (in the physical realm.)

keep it up


oh yeah, did they run that Habitat ad?
 
ok, is it just me or is the swinging choppy. I can't be bothered to see how my acer laptop's cpu is going but it is quite choppy

BTW: If you have the flash running at 12fps i reccomend you at least change it to 25fps
 
Nice, but I agree that the art is getting overshadowed by the ambience of the site. And you need to fix those "undefined" errors.

Other than that, be sure to post another thread when everything's up and running! Looks good.
 
great work! I agree with what everyone has said so far, but I would also stop the header from swinging after a couple of seconds. I think it gets distracting when you are trying to look at the stuff below....

remember our eye moves to motion first then highest contrast then the bright areas etc. etc...
 
First question: Who's your target audience? Is it a niche crowd, or broader scope?

With the answer to the first, you can then ask yourself if a complete flash site is appropriate. If it's a niche audience, it might very well be. If the intent of the site is a broader audience, then you will want to ask yourself, "Why am I controlling the end user's experience, instead of allowing them to control it?"

While flash is "fun" to work with, its use as a complete basis for a website is becoming quite stale. Certainly you see it being used a lot, but if Nike jumped of a bridge, would you do the same?

Full sites like this also eat up a lot of an end users time, waiting for it to load.

While it might not make a difference for you or I, someone that has a lesser connection speed that would fall in love with your work may never see it as they will fly off elsewhere due to the wait.

If that's just some old bat you're not interested in, so what. But what if it could be the person that could cut you a big break? Maybe that isn't likely, but why take the chance of excluding them?

If you're set on the flash design, cool. It's your site, and you can have it your way. But, also be prepared that you may turn away people as well. If that's an acceptable option, then don't sweat it.

If it were me in this position I would have a clean, fast loading site. Then offer a basic gallery of work, or a fully interactive flash gallery. Let your visitors make the choice.


Regardless of what you end up doing, be sure your pages validate. Right now, your page above does not.

And yes Veronica, you can be standards compliant when embedding flash. Er, there is a Santa Claus.
 
by no means is this site done, i got the basic concept down and was looking for opinions, i should offer an html approach i was thinking about with basic gallery ive seen both around on my friends art sites. once again though this is just a test to see how it will work,(what does and doesnt). i know about the undefined in the gallery as i havent updated the xml, just to see if i got it all up and running. maybe im going backwards and forwards but flash right now is new to me so this is an experiment. ive always been into animation so i think the flash approach will be apart of my site. im not following any leaders(nike) im just trying to go my own way with the tools im using. there is no flash detection yet. im just getting comfortable with the software.. more to come.
 
oo the fps is at 24. the size of the flash file is only 570kb not that much of a strain to download i was thinking.
habitat ad wasnt printed
 
for a first crack it's good, and if it reflects you and your work as a whole, not just in the samples then that's a good thing, but if that's the approach, then expand on it, make it more so. The individual elements are brilliant, but the stuff tying it together is less so - ok, cute, but not brilliant and to some extent a little wearying after a bit.

Either the work needs to be more dominant and the structural elements less so, or the inbetween elements need to be more like your samples - personally i'd go for the former.

I'm not having any issues with the site loading or running, but then i have Flash 8 and a broadband connection. only 570kb? Try that on dialup at 5kb/s. I'm hoping it's different where you are and where your audience is, but here broadband only has about 25% penetration overall. Your audience is probably likely to be mostly in that 25%, so maybe you don't need to worry about it, but it's worth bearing in mind.
 
the frames do get a little redundant around everything. maybe making the top frame smaller? And the navigation window bigger. loosing the frame around the navigation window looks better.. and i still dont know what to do for a backround for the whole thing, thats why i have the circles. i live an hour out of nyc, i should think about the rest of the population and speeds.

im going to start an html site today aswell to cover both spectrums. i was going to do a store but should have one place for it, i was going to use paypal(cheap). is there a way to load an html page into a flash file?
 
thegord said:
by no means is this site done, i got the basic concept down and was looking for opinions, i should offer an html approach i was thinking about with basic gallery ive seen both around on my friends art sites. once again though this is just a test to see how it will work,(what does and doesnt). i know about the undefined in the gallery as i havent updated the xml, just to see if i got it all up and running. maybe im going backwards and forwards but flash right now is new to me so this is an experiment. ive always been into animation so i think the flash approach will be apart of my site. im not following any leaders(nike) im just trying to go my own way with the tools im using. there is no flash detection yet. im just getting comfortable with the software.. more to come.


;)

I wasn't knocking it, so don't get bummed on yourself. What you have so far is great, for being entirely flash. I guess I was a little strong with referring to nike, and to be honest I don't recall if their site is still entirely flash or not. It was more of a reference to how "big business" tends to think behind the curve more than anything.

Experimentation is always good, and can be very fun and rewarding as well. It's how we learn, and a part of the process.

For an "art gallery" type site, it should be cutting edge to an extent, so if an entire flash site is a good call for that, so be it. Just remember your target audience. At the very least though, I would put together a nice alternative site that is targeted to low bandwidth users. Then let the individual user decide which they prefer to view.

However, for a low bandwidth site, 500k is a little large. It would take probably 3-5min for a dialer to load the full deal. For a low bandwidth page, try to target somewhere around 100k-120k tops. If you can get it down to less, even better.
 
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