Letterwings and Things

The Making Of

2010-09-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Multiple Background Layers:
The first hurdle I needed to over come was that I had three layers for the background. Viget Inspire is a really good example of a site that uses many background layers which are placed on several overlapping divs. For my site I realised that I needed to use the repeating paper pattern on the lowest layer (the body layer) then add background images to header and footer divs. The header also had another div for the logo badge that allows you to click on it to return to the home page.

@font-face:
One way to add a unique typeface to a site is to use a font-face kit. FontSquirrel provides a large collection of free font-face kits (as well as a font-face kit maker). This Youtube video by NetTuts is a very clear tutorial on how to add the font onto a site.

The Dreaded Twitter Widget:
Twitter kindly provides a free widget that allows you to display twitter feeds from publicly available accounts.
While it allows for some customisation, the base model did not fit all that well into my website. So I needed to figure out how to tweak it (mainly the header, the footer and try and get a transparent background).
The transparent background was the easy part apparently: Simply type none instead of a colour number in to the twitter widget. Instant transparent background.After a lot of searching I found that removing the header and footer were equally simple enough, you just need to find the right tags: twtr-hd and twtr-ft and using CSS set display:none
A more detailed explanation can be found here.

The only thing I couldn’t find out was how to adjust the colour of the horizontal rules between each twitter post. Also, for some reason however, IE demands that you download an ActiveX control. I’m not quite sure how to fix this, so I apologise in advance if you are viewing the site with IE.

The search bar:
Again tutorials came as a great help here. The placement of the search box was the most fiddly part of the process.

Two other resources proved invaluable. The first was Html Dog which goes through the dos and do-nots of coding.The other was Jennifer Niederst Robbins’ “Learning Web Design” which carefully explains the ins and outs of web design from coding to publishing. Could not have done with out it.

Other than that, most of it was coded using what I had learnt in the class tutorials and adapting where I could.

Web Design Project quick links:
Post 1: Country and/or Western - Project Choice
Post 2: Inspirational Bits and Bobs - Research and Inspiration
Post 3: Initial Layout - Website Flat Graphic
Post 4: Now Showing - Website Link
Post 5: The Making Of - The Making of the Site

Now Showing...

2010-09-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

My design for the Canberra Country Music Festival is now live.

Examples of stuff:
Subnavigation: Most of the pages except for the Home and Contact pages have sub navigation menus in the left column.
Fragmental Links: Go to About>FAQ
Link to external website: the Twitter/Myspace/Youtube/Facebook links on the right hand menu (listed under "Follow")
An Email Link: In the left column of the Contact Page
File Download: On the Program page.
Form input field: The search bar in the right column of any page or a more in-depth form on the Contact Page.
Google Map: On the Getting There page
Youtube videos: Program>Performers>chose any of the performers to see one of their music video clips.

Web Design Project quick links:
Post 1: Country and/or Western - Project Choice
Post 2: Inspirational Bits and Bobs - Research and Inspiration
Post 3: Initial Layout - Website Flat Graphic
Post 4: Now Showing - Website Link
Post 5: The Making Of - The Making of the Site

Initial Layout

2010-09-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

A flat of what the final page design will look like:

The Design:
As mentioned in the last post, I wanted to give the website a rustic, vintage feel. Like you had discovered it in the shed out the back, all browned with age but still pretty to look at.

The background photo was one I took earlier in the year of Lake George, overlayed with a paper texture and using a vintage sunburst pattern in the headder to enhance the colours of the background. The main body uses a repeating paper pattern so that it blends seamlessly.

The site is designed within the confines of a centred 960px wide page however the top and bottom background layers extend to 2000px before fading into the paper texture to account for larger screen sizes.

The header and navigation are again inspired by woodpress labels and posters designed to integrate with the background layers and building the colour scheme:

White: #fffae5
Black: #111111
Russet red: #75220e

Note that pure black and pure white are not used. They are too harsh and would kill the softened look of the site. Even the forms use the off white colour.

The image beneath the navigation and the header introduces the page and will change depending on which section of the site the user is visiting. This is particularly functional on the Location Pages (used for the placement of a Google map) or the artist pages, which will show a large image each performer.

There are three columns within the main wrapper. The left hand column (200 px) is reserved on the home page for twitter updates or as a column for sub-navigation on other pages.

The centre column (480px) is reserved for the main content.

The right column (280 px) is a Woodpress inspired shortcut menu. Many festival websites use shortcut menus for the most frequently visted links on their site. This is also where I will be placing the search bar.

The site only uses two/possibly three main fonts:

Verdana for text
Georgia for certain headers
League Gothic (a font licensed for @font-face use) for main headers.

At the moment, I don't know what size the text and line spacing will be, I'll have to test out what looks best in-browser.

All links, on mouse over, will be underlined to make them more noticeable to users and differentiate them from other emphasised text. In text links will be bold and russet red to make them stand out.

All images used will either be mine, those used on the original website or artists performing at the show.

Web Design Project quick links:
Post 1: Country and/or Western - Project Choice
Post 2: Inspirational Bits and Bobs - Research and Inspiration
Post 3: Initial Layout - Website Flat Graphic
Post 4: Now Showing - Website Link
Post 5: The Making Of - The Making of the Site

Inspirational Bits and Bobs

2010-09-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

First things first. What does country music look like? Well, from research it seems the undisputed home of country and western music is Nashville, TN. So lets go there first.
The Country Music Association (CMA) holds a big music festival in Nashville every year. This is what there website looks like:

Instantly we see a style: Red and Black with beige whites and a blue highlight colour. The logo is a badge design centred in the menu. There are elements of eroded lettering but is balanced with smooth edged graphics, with a slick gradient in the main-content area. The background image is a stage photograph that remains static while the page rolls down. This site mainly uses type and colour to make it feel "country".

In Australia, Tamworth is the home of country and it too holds a huge country festival every year. Here is their website:

Similar concept but used in a different way. Again, same colour scheme: Red, off-white and Black. Instead of eroded lettering, this uses a paint-peeled background. So instead of using colour and type to emulate country, this uses colour and texture and is balanced by refined typography.

But this country style can be found on lots of websites that range from country fashion outlets to cottonseed oil.

www.cottonseedoiltour.com

www.thefarmerandthechef.com

www.rmwilliams.com.au

www.storypixel.com

It's clear from these examples that the elements I talked about previously are common among a lot of country inspired websites. Harsh blacks and whites are out, rich earthy colours are in. Typography is essential and imagery and texture are just as important.

But I’ve also been looking at sources from the real world. A lot of inspiration was drawn from photos and objects and ephemera such as labels from bourbon and wine bottles. Also of particular interest for their typographic layout were hand painted signs and woodpress posters so often associated with the wild west.

And I can’t forget this Rawhide Annual I found under the house. Starring Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood. Again the hand drawn typefaces and the colours scream wild west:
And finally, last semester I went on a photoshoot out at the Yass Rodeo. A heck of a lot of fun because everything takes place so darn quickly. The colours from the costumes and the surrounding area again provide a good source of inspiration. Again, looking at the photos, the predominant colours are reds, browns, some blues (from jeans), gold-yellow, soft-black and off-white. It seems this colour-theme is one of those unbreakable rules.

Web Design Project quick links:
Post 1: Country and/or Western - Project Choice
Post 2: Inspirational Bits and Bobs - Research and Inspiration
Post 3: Initial Layout - Website Flat Graphic
Post 4: Now Showing - Website Link
Post 5: The Making Of - The Making of the Site

Country and/or Western

2010-09-03T04:57:00.000-07:00

Instead of starting a new blog, I thought I’d just resurrect an this one and dust off the cobwebs as I go. As for the website I plan on redesigning, I chose the Canberra Country Music Festival. The amount of text is reasonable to work with and, although there aren’t many large photos on the main site, it links to sites that do have photos so I should be right for resources.

Web Design Project quick links:
Post 1: Country and/or Western - Project Choice
Post 2: Inspirational Bits and Bobs - Research and Inspiration
Post 3: Initial Layout - Website Flat Graphic
Post 4: Now Showing - Website Link
Post 5: The Making Of - The Making of the Site

The Metapost

2009-06-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

After nearly three months of posting this blog has looked at various aspects of networked media. The majority of the blog was devoted to integrating what I had learnt from the lectures and tutorials and how it related to the use of the “networked media” in other areas that I’m interested in, using relevant and current examples.

I also tried to build posts that would give both my opinion, yet allow the reader to come to their own conclusions by providing them with source reading material that inspired the post in the first place.

My three nominated posts are:

In No fury like Twitter Scorned which at the time resulted in an uproar in the twitter design community, I tried to give readings that gave both sides of the story so that the reader could go deeper into the readings if they so wished, and then I related this topic back to networked media by commenting on the power of Twitter and the use of # tags.

In Creative Commons and Copyright I tried to build on the tutorial content of creative commons and bring in issues of certain copyright laws that may have a big impact on the use of the networked media. Again I try to provide various resources that inspired the post so that the reader can build their own opinion of the issue at hand.

In Web 2.0 I feel provides a larger summary of what I’ve learnt in the duration of this course by using relevant examples, integrating relevant links and video to help express the content of the post

Traffic and connecting with the networked media world:
When it came to adjusting the design of this blog, I set up a test blog which I could trial my css adjustments on and save it as a template before applying it here on this blog. Using Bloggerbuster.com as a resource to help me to navigate the html and css code I adjusted the Minima White template – tweaking the colours of the text to match the theme and adjusting width of the columns and header fill a 1024 x 768 resolution screen (as the statistics suggested that none of this blogs readers were using lesser screen resolutions). I have also used the blogroll gadget to encourage readers to check out a few of the blogs I’m interested in both within the class and outside it to give an idea that I’ve

Analytics:
Using Google’s Analytics, I found that generally there was traffic of about two or three a day shortly after I posted. Some traffic is came through blogrolls on the blogs of peers or through blog followers. While I did leave it a bit late to sign up for an Analytics account (so it’s difficult to tell a pattern to when the traffic is coming in) it is encouraging to know that others are interested in and connecting with my blog.

As for knowing which content is the most popular, Analytics is no help because of the nature of the design of Blogger, the posts are all on the one page and I am unable to tell from commenting because there hasn’t been any. While there hasn’t been any commenting, I have tried to encourage it with topics like “Twitter scorned” or “Copyright” which do allow for anyone to voice their opinion, for or against the issue I presented.

Popular or not, I still feel that the three nominated posts best reflected what I learnt throughout the Networked Media Production unit.

Design and Networked Media

2009-06-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

In a self-response to a previous post of my own illustrations and photography, I thought I might write about what I actually use networked media for.

I mainly use the web through forums, blogs and the like to learn from and connect with other graphic designers, discovering new techniques and learning from other tutorials or advice:

Freelance Switch:

After discovering and reading the e-book “How to be a Freelance Rockstar” by Bondi-based designers Cyan and Collis Ta’eed, I followed through to the Freelance Switch website an online magazine usually posting daily articles on freelancing advice, mostly for designers, copywriters, coders and other areas. Even if you’re not freelancing there are some great articles that all creatives should be thinking about including dealing with clients, portfolios, ergonomics etc. The site also offers a jobs board, a forum and a radio podcast.

Graphic Design Week:
Along those lines I’ll recommend Graphic Design Week that AI and PSD Tuts hosted this week. A heck of a lot of links, tutorials, articles and inspiration on all areas of Graphic Design.

I also follow the works of artists and designers through blogs or websites.

Spoon Graphics:
I came across this graphic design blog a couple of years ago when I was looking for tutorials on using the right black for print. This nicely designed blog by UK based designer Chris Spooner is full of articles, tutorials, inspirational sites and downloads with decent content (not just another picture show blog).

Steven Watkins:
Since beginning the Motion Graphics class this semester I’ve been on the look out for inspirational motion designs and along came the WWF ticks ad, a beautiful use of music and animation to make an ad you actually want to watch again.
Wanting to know who had made it and what else they had done I went searching and discovered the work of Melbourne based designer Steven Watkins.

I learn a lot from other people’s contributions to this networked media and for that I’m grateful.

But what do I contribute?
Not as much as I’d like to. I’ve always had this feeling that because I’m inexperienced in real world design jobs that I really don’t have any authority to contribute anything when it comes to design. Sure, I know when there are far too many fonts used in a design or when compositions look off, but I still feel awkward making a point when I haven’t had any real world experience. Or maybe I’m just put off by designers that hit back at their critics by saying “but it’s my style”.

As for putting my own work up for show:
I’ve always thought about starting a gallery but I’ve never been too sure about which gallery site to use or whether some of my work is actually good enough to go up onto the web. While I am learning to be a designer I’m still very self-conscious about my work and I’m hesitant again because I feel I lack the experience to be able to judge it and tell whether it’s worthy to put on show and ready to receive constructive criticism.

Even so. I put a few pictures in a previous post just to show everyone that I can do something. Comments and constructive criticism are more than welcome.

Project B - Geo-Narrative

2009-06-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Read the story

Why a Fictional Narrative:
Initially I struggled to come up with a decent concept to use as a geo-narrative. I found that many of the GoogleMap narratives that I came across in my research were mainly non-fictional stories whether they be historical narratives (such as The Rabbit Proof Fence narrative) or holiday travel narratives. The only example of a fictional narrative that I could find was 21 Steps by Charles Cumming In that way, I felt like I could contribute to this area of literature and create something relatively unique.

Because a Geo-Narrative essentially demands a story that moves around a lot geographically, this affected the style of story I wrote. Initially I was going to use a narrative available to the Public Domain through Project Gutenberg however most of the stories I came across were set in the one place for too long. So I wrote The Arc as an adventure/mystery that unfolds in two countries – Australia and Italy and is mostly kept on the move.

Because the assignment called for the use of images, I also researched the designs of web comics such as Lackadaisy and Under Lock and Key which use a visual form of narrative through utilising online media.

To be effective, web comics should be interesting on every page through effective use of image and dialogue, having an introduction and conclusion on each page yet still flow and entice people to click through to the next – partly because most web comics also have a regular updating schedule such as one page a week.

From this I decided to use a similar idea for my narrative. Each placemark window has a beginning and end yet encourages the user to click through to the next page. I also used images to help tell a line of the story and establish the mood and setting of an area. I felt this made my work a bit more unique than other geo-narrative works that I was able to find. Ideally I would have liked the entire narrative to be written with graphics, but limitations in time made that option inappropriate. Potentially, if I were to build on the story, I could do so by updating each page once a week similar to a web comic.

The hardest part about developing a concept was the research. I had to find out exactly where I could set the story so that it could fairly accurately interact with the real world locations (even though I set the story some time in the future). Further, researching places in Italy, a country I have never visited before, helped me learn how to research foreign areas and use GoogleMaps to get directions and view photos posted by other users to establish a setting I knew nothing about.

However, when it came to creating map, one of the most frustrating aspects of using GoogleMaps was editing HTML code. Whenever I used a table to set the image, three or four extra tr and td tags would appear after I saved my map. Although it didn’t do anything to the overall appearance, when I go back to edit the code, it was so disorganised that I spent half of my time trying to neaten the unnecessary code to work out what I was doing. Further, errors and glitches in GoogleMaps meant that several of my attempts to add to the map ended up not saving at all.

Other tools, such as the "Stick to Roads" feature of the polygon lines were also very sensitive and would often cause errors that again, prevented GoogleMaps from saving.

Relation to the Networked Culture:
I used a combination of my own illustrated pictures, remixed images and Creative Commons Licensed images acquired from Flickr and WikiCommons. All images used in the story that were either remixed or CC were credited under each of them with the names given on the owner’s Flickr site (which is called for under Creative Commons Licensed work) and a link to where the image was found should readers wish to view more of the photographers work.

Throughout the story I also linked to a few sources that related to the narrative in some way (for example the Koko Black website, an Italian-English phrase translator and so on) that a reader may be interested in looking up when reading the story.

I decided to keep The Arc as “Unlisted” because I noticed when researching for locations that several people’s narratives were conflicting with the information I wanted to get (for example Koko Black location about 5 people post conflicting information). I didn’t want people to confuse my fictional story with actual information about the areas (I would, however, have left the story as public if the narrative was non-fiction or in the Public Domain).

I’m fairly happy with the end result. I would have loved to have been able to create a more animated map and be able to use linked or multiple paged windows, particularly for longer pieces of narrative, like what was used in 21 Steps. However I have no knowledge of Javascript and so I did what I could with the knowledge of GoogleMaps I have such as placing three or four placemarkers in the same spot to make it appear as if the narrative is occurring in the same place. Therefore the user (as I mentioned in the story description) needs to navigate the story by using the markers in the sidebar.

Data Visualisation

2009-05-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

Well unfortunately due to unavoidable circumstances, I missed the last lecture. So, now that the notes are up I can finally try to define exactly what data visualisation and infographics are. I hope I got this right. If not, comment and tell me so I know.

Because it’s often difficult for us to fully comprehend large amounts of information and it’s significance, we can use data visualisation. Data visualisation is a technique used to represent large amounts of abstract data in a graphical way, carefully balancing aesthetics and functionality in order to clearly communicate that information to the viewer.

At it’s very simplest it can be a bar or pie graph but there are more effective visualisations that have been created.

One of the first example I ever remember seeing of data visualisation was “The Face of Sydney” photography project that took place a few years ago.

The male and female faces of Sydney were created after merging together thousands of portraits of people from across Pyrmont, Millers Point, Rosebery, Redfern, Waterloo, Newtown, East Sydney, Glebe, The Rocks, Ultimo, Haymarket, CBD and Alexandria (these cities received their own “Faces of” portraits as well).

By being able to see a huge amount of data in this way it makes it easier for the viewer to analyse, compare and often discover unintended connections. Of course in the above example there is a limit to what can be deduced from this sort of data visualisation but there are other visualisations such as the New York Time's Medal Chart that allow us to see trends – in this case not just in athletic performance but also in team size and politics. Being able to see medal tallies in this way we can see the political side of the Olympics. Notice a large absence of normally large gold winners absent during the boycott of the ’88 Moscow games.

Data visualisations tend to work a lot better when there is a lot of data to handle – too much for a human to comprehend otherwise. Information Graphics has more to do with visually communicating smaller amounts of information to an audience as concisely as possible with the aid of graphics and minimum text such as pictorial instruction manuals which can cross language barriers. One example of a Information Graphics artist is Max Gadney. His site shows how he approaches different projects and illustrations based on how the viewer will interpret the information.

There are many different approaches to similar problems out there that are beautiful yet so simple to understand and can actually change your attitude as to how you might represent data than with just a pie chart.

Crowdsourcing

2009-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

Seeing as how somehow or other I lost my draft before I was able to publish it, I shall try this again.

Sometimes there are projects that are just too difficult, time hungry or expensive to complete alone or with a small team, particularly those that require the constant repetition of certain actions. This is where using the power of crowds (such as those on the Web) become handy. By breaking the big task down into many, tiny, managable chunks it is possible to outsource these to a large community (sometimes for a fee).

Kind of like Josiah Wedgwood’s industrial line. Except the amount of people on that line is much larger, the tasks much smaller and almost anyone can join. The theory behind it is that the whole is more than the sum of it’s parts.

I was really fascinated by this crowdsourcing project, I was really fascinated by this crowdsourcing project, Ten Thousand Cents where an image of a $100 US bill was broken down into 10 000 sections for people to copy:

Then there’s the crowdsource project Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, which broke down the song “Bicycle Built for Two” (sung by a computer) into single words or notes. These files were then given to people to mimic exactly.

I wonder if it’s possible to crowd source animation - a world wide web of in-betweeners?

Web2.0

2009-05-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 refers to a distinct second generation of the web that evolved from what is now termed Web 1.0. Instead of allowing information to be given to us as was the case with 1.0, we as users of 2.0 can now author information, organise it, connect with others and share it, build it and a heck of a lot more that is so very neatly summed up in this clip by Michael Wesch:

So what are the implications of Web2.0?
Well connectivity for starters. The world is a lot smaller now. Community groups can form regardless of the area in which their members physically live based on common interests. The way we categorise information has developed into folksonomy through the use of tags, grouping things in numerous ways all at the same time.

Web2.0 changes the way we speak – a few years ago a tweet would have been sound a bird made, now it’s a 140 character statement to the world. It’s also affected design style. Glossy, shiny rounded buttons, rounded bubbly text and lots of bright colours have become inextricably linked to Web2.0 because of their use on sites like twitter, flickr, digg and so on.

Due to the ease of sharing work on Web2.0, this has called for the need to build laws such as Creative Commons that help people to negotiate copyright and share work more easily. Such collaborative works or mash-ups can also foster creativity such as Thru-You, a bunch of youtube clips all mashed together to form completely new songs.

Unfortunately, sharing work incidentally means that work can also be stolen or pirated with greater ease. There are also the nastier forms of social interaction like bullying that abuses Web2.0s ability to share information quickly and freely.

But since I don’t want to end the blog on a negative, I think one of the most positive things to have come out of web2.0 is the “Long-Tail”. There are amazing works being produced out there in the world today (and from yesteryear) but because these works are obscure and little known, they rarely get shelf space over the more popular and safer brands.

Through web2.0 however these obscure works can still gain shelf space. For example Amazon’s “Also bought” feature or Lastfm “stations” that organises music in a similar manner. Obscure works can become popular very quickly through the connectivity now available. It’s this sort of thing that helps build a greater cultural awareness and it’s this sort of thing that I like about web2.0, discovering gems of works that you’d never have discovered if you had relied on more force fed forms of media.

No fury like Twitter scorned...

2009-04-23T01:01:00.000-07:00

Anybody noticed this article from the NMP feeds? It looks like it’s caused quite a maelstrom:

Admittedly, I’ve never heard of him before this case but he must have had some following because many designers rallied behind him in the twitter campaign SaveJon, tweeting and re-tweeting the message. Digg, Google, Boingboing, Slashdot, deviantART all had features on the case within a couple of days of this article being posted.

But this is just one side of a really messy story and it is important to consider the other. I recommend this article by Steve Douglas from The Logo Factory.

Just to clarify: Spec-work websites are sites where a designer will pitch their designs for a particular contract for free, competing against other designers to be chosen by the client. Free-pitching in any form is condemned by many peak design bodies around the world (including AGDA and DIA) for various reasons, but that’s not the point I'm focusing on in this particular post so I’ll talk about it in another.

I wish I could come to some nice and tidy conclusion on this, but I can’t. Though I do have my own thoughts I don’t think it’s fair to voice them without all the evidence and in my opinion the only hard proof is not just in metadata but in the original sketches (paper and pencil/ink – not digital). Sure the end result can be faked, just like how a painting can be copied. What can’t be copied is the research, hundreds of sketches and the x-rays (layers underneath the sketches that have been erased or covered up) that lead up to the final, refined result. Obviously in order to protect their cases I doubt either party will publish their design sketches publicly (fair enough).

What is fascinating though is the sheer size in which this case escalated through Twitter and from there into many sites dedicated to design.

Now, I don’t use Twitter: There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to waste my time on it, I don’t use my phone all that much and I really don’t think that what I think of during the day is all that interesting at all. I have heard it’s can be a useful medium for people looking for help (the Engle case obviously proves that) and somewhat irritating when used for marketing gains. But 140 characters is the bane here. With so little information this space allows for, it’s very easy to re-tweet before finding out all the facts and coming to your own conclusions. And as a result it also goes to show just how reputations can be damaged publicly within a matter of days.

So I suppose the only way to sum up this still-open story is to use a moral: Look before you leap, think before you speak.

Project 1 Rationale

2009-04-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

Why a recipe gallery?
Of all the things I could have chosen to make a gallery about, why recipes?

I was going through some of the old boxes under my house and came across several biscuit tins. Upon opening them I discovered many recipes that had been old family favourites but had been forgotten about because they were both hidden away and completely disorganised. After the lecture “Carving up the world” I quickly realised that these recipes could be neatly organised by labels using online tools to showcase them in a gallery so that others may also enjoy them.

So that is essentially the theme of my blog. All recipes in The Biscuit Tin were recipes had been passed down by my grandparents, great grandparents or from others who had lived in the early half of the 20th Century. The recipes, while timeless, reflect the area, time, and culture in which these people lived. So I felt that it was important to bring to light these recipes and the stories about them that make them so important to our cultural history.

Other examples of recipe galleries:
There are some good examples and poor example of recipe collections.

The Australian Gutenberg Project (by the National Library of Australia) uploads information from old books to make available for everyone. While the idea is good and the recipes it contains are delicious, it is presented purely in text form. Although it is intended to be a library of information, this method of collating recipes is almost completely unusable because the recipes are organised by the book they came from, making them difficult to locate.

Other recipe sites such as the MSN recipefinder or blogs such as Domestic Diva use search boxes. While it may be useful for large recipe sites, for a small one like mine it was less practical. So I decided to go with a top bar menu like the one used along the top of Kalyn's Kitchen.

Why did I use a blog to host the collection of recipes?
There are many ways to host a gallery including building a website from scratch, using sites such as flickr that acts as a library of images and text or blogs (which is what I chose to use).

A blog is a social medium that can allow two way communication between the viewers and the blog’s creator through the commenting system. With recipes, it’s always nice to be able to ask about certain parts of recipes if there’s some confusion, or if people have found alternative ingredients they can all comment on the recipe. Blogs also have an RSS subscription – should people choose to subscribe, new recipes will arrive in their reader whenever the site updates. A blog is also relatively simple to set up as opposed to building a website from scratch.

Why use Google’s Blogger?
Of all the blogging engines, I’ve found that Blogger and Wordpress seem to be the most flexible in their designs, allowing the possibility to build menus, adjust it for a range of uses, and hosting generally nice designs (or the possibility to build nicely designed pages).

In the end however, I chose the Blogger blogging engine because:
(a) I’ve already practiced using it and have found it relatively easy to use - I was originally going to use Wordpress because I knew they had a large range of preset themes that I could choose from. However, when it came to actually using Word press I was a little daunted by the cluttered dashboard on Wordpress and found it difficult to get used to.
(b)I didn’t want to be too limited in design. While Wordpress has a huge gallery of themes, they are very limited in how you can manipulate code without first paying to use a seemingly free service. Blogger, while it only has very simple themes to choose from, is a lot easier to tweak the html and css code to suit a design that I want. This was important when it comes to both differentiating my blog from the rest and being able to show off the recipes in the best possible way.

The design:
I kept this gallery very simple and user friendly. A gallery is a space that should be designed to show off its collection, not take away from it. So I used white space generously, a limited colour scheme that was picked from a photo of food (making the site a bit more appetizing), and strong pictures that show off each of recipes, making them inviting to look at.

I used Bloggers “labels” to create the links in the menu on the top bar for ease of navigation. Clicking on, for example, “Savoury” brings up all recipes labelled as “Savoury”. This is a much simpler option than either browsing through the archives or using a search button to look for things that might not necessarily be on the blog.

Copyright:
I know some of the recipes had been originally based on recipes found in books but had been adjusted over the years by my family using their own techniques. So I had to research what was considered copyright violation when it came to recipes. According to Australian Copyright Law copyright protects the literary publication of a recipe, that is, you can’t photocopy it or reproduce its original form in any other way. However copyright doesn’t protect the recipe owner’s list of ingredients, or if someone develops their own method of preparing the food product. That meant I could safely put up the recipes I had in my collection, but recipes from elsewhere I had to avoid.

As this project also called for using resources from outside my own collection, I decided to use Creative Commons “Attribution Licensed” images from Flickr to complement some of the collection. All images used in the gallery were credited in each of the recipes introductions with the names given on the owner’s Flickr site (which is called for under Creative Commons Licensed work).

Overall, I’m pleased with the result. Recipes are designed to be shared and the online medium is perhaps the best place to share them with as many people as possible, building a community based on people genuinely wanting to comment, build on and enjoy the recipes one has to share.

Carving up the world

2009-04-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

Taxonomy is a method of categorising things into increasingly smaller groups of similar attributes (Linnaean taxonomy in biological science is a good example) in an attempt to neatly carve up the world and organise these things in an orderly fashion.

It’s a top-down classification system (that is, it’s hierarchy based). An object is categorised by pre-set terms depending on the particular taxonomy system being used. In taxonomy, there should only be one way to classify an object.

The problem comes when we discover things that defy the rules that organise everything else, a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit into a seemingly ordered world. New terms need to be made, everything else in the ordered world needs to be re-checked. The world gets more complicated.

When the first specimens of the platypus were sent to Europe, many believed the platypus to be a fake. Later when it was realised it wasn’t a joke, for some time the platypus had a scientific name that translated to “bird-like paradox”.

Folksonomy, on the other hand, is considered bottom-up classification. An object can belong to an unlimited amount of categories that can be freely created by anyone (often called tags on the web). One of the best examples would be applications such as delicious.

My main problem with this style of categorisation is the control over these tags. Because technically there is no right or wrong way to tag, what happens when people go overboard with tags? Stuff just gets too hard to find again.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Say there is an article about a magpie lark (aka a peewee or a mud lark). If someone were to tag this article as (among other things) magpie lark, magpie and lark two of those tags would be wrong. A magpie lark is neither a magpie, nor a lark (absurd but true). In another case, if someone were to tag an article about Kevin Rudd as Rudd, PM and Brisbanian all three are true but is the last one necessary?

They both have their purposes; they both have their short comings. Very few things sit neatly into a predefined category but being placed into too many categories is just as useless. Personally I’d like to see more organisation in folksonomy such as grouping tags (like bundles in Delicious). Or that might just be because I use groups too much in Photoshop.

Creative Commons and Copyright

2009-03-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

Creative Commons is, basically put, a way of identifying what you can and can’t do with an author’s creation, giving others the freedom to use your work and clear identification of uses to prevent the confusion that comes with copyright laws. If you want to allow people absolute freedom to use your artwork, there’s a licence for it. If you want to limit usage there are various licences for that also. It is reassuring that there are organisations such as Creative Commons out there trying to support both artists and users who genuinely want to do the right thing by creating free licences and working to integrate the CC licence into the laws of numerous countries.

However, all too often I’ve seen people rip off artwork, repost it and in some cases sell prints of someone else’s work. And with an Orphan Works Bill looming in the U.S.A. copyright on the Internet is certainly going to get a lot more interesting. I’ve found a few articles from different perspectives that can better explain what’s going on and give you various perspectives.

What is the Orphan Works Bill and the implications in Australia

An artist’s perspective

An attorney’s perspective

In very simple terms any work that has an unknown author is technically up for grabs to the first bidder. There is huge room for abuse. In order to ensure that your work is safe, from what I've been able to tell, it may come to it that in order to completely secure their legal copyright, people will have to pay to register their work (against the Berne Convention which the United States has signed).

I’m considerably concerned. The larger corporations have had a terrible record of taking advantage of copyright laws because they are big enough and have the money to get away with it (Disney have notoriously been known to throw their weight around when it comes to prolonging their own copyright).

The Internet makes this Bill an international problem. How can anyone who posts their work online protect their rights? No matter where you are in the world it seems like everyone is going to have to pay to protect themselves.

The Bill is currently hanging in the air to be looked at again later this year.

HTML & CSS

2009-03-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have never until last Friday used CSS. I’m actually glad that I got that introduction to CSS in NWM, because I’ve never known what style sheets actually did. I didn’t really get the point that HTML is more for describing the content while CSS is for the presentation of that content and as such style sheets are a much better way of designing your page than using HTML on its own.

I learnt HTML many years ago (for some reason now forgotten) through Lissa Explains but I never really understood the section on CSS, so I ignored it. I eventually got sick of writing never-ending font and table HTML tags and gave up HTML altogether. Now I learn that all that pain could have been resolved if I hadn’t ignored CSS in the first place. No more HTML-inflicted RSI.

In the past I have used Photoshop/Dreamweaver (which incorporates CSS) to build a site and every so often I’d flick over to the HTML view to see what was happening and quite honestly I freaked. I don’t know if it’s just the way Dreamweaver writes code or what but it was far too messy for me to begin to understand so I went back to the normal view and on my merry, ignorant way I went.

But now that I know what is actually going on, I feel a lot more confident in attempting to write my own code and understanding what goes on in the background of a website. Knowing CSS now makes coding a lot less daunting. So I’m going to have a stab at redesigning this blog in the some time soon (these templates are a tad bit depressing for my tastes).

On that note, I found a bit of inspiration last week (before I understood CSS) in Blogger Buster. Basically it’s a website that helps Blogger users (sorry Wordpress users) to build a better blog, and working around the limited templates to build your own designs.

Blogging on...

2009-03-08T03:44:00.000-07:00

The first post of Letterwings and Things – a conglomeration of my scribblings, ideas, opinions and resources on both Networked Media and my own interests in graphic design and all sorts of things. Since I've never written a blog before, its going to be a shaky start but anywho.

So from the lectures and tutorial, I set up this blogging account and an RSS reader and got to searching for inspirational blogs to follow.

RSS Readers: Now I’ve never really known what an RSS reader was until the lecture - basically it collects updates from blogs you have selected to follow and sends the raw content of every new post to one convenient location to view them from. Makes following my favourite blogs a heck of a lot easier and gives me more time. Bonus.

Technorati: Previously I have never really “searched” for blogs, I have just tripped over them on a website, from another blog or by word of mouth. So when it came time to actively searching out a blog in the tutorial, I found it a lot more painful than I thought it would be. It’s not the world’s most user-friendly search engine but to be fair, I can tend to be a little vague at times so we’re probably both at fault. It would, however, make things easier if some of those filters like the “Search posts/blog/photos/videos” were on the main page next to the search bar.

I was after a graphic design blog that was not just a gallery of images but contained decent content. After countless attempts of rewriting “graphic design”, narrowing it down, using the advanced options and getting nowhere I eventually typed in “Design Inspiration” and of course it was as simple as that. Those I found that had a particularly good balance between content and images included Smashing Magazine, Noupe, My Ink Blog. All three have a fairly high authority according to technorati and are usually updated every couple of days (if not every day).

With all that set up I agonised for an age about what to write and that’s probably my biggest weakness when it comes to blogging – knowing what to write. But it’s done now. So there you have it. The first post.