quote:Originally posted by dantesparadigm: What exactly is that?
This was my response as well.
If you want to keep the same general design, my recommendation would be to make the transitions between elements more smooth. Right now, there is a very abrupt transition between elements in the banner, which makes it look very disjointed. Also, I'd recommend making the boundaries less linear and a bit more organic looking.
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Blayne Bradley
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I like Red Alert 3.
And Battlefield games, especially when modded to be 1000% better then the original like Project Reality or Forgotten Hope.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by ricree101:
quote:Originally posted by dantesparadigm: What exactly is that?
This was my response as well.
If you want to keep the same general design, my recommendation would be to make the transitions between elements more smooth. Right now, there is a very abrupt transition between elements in the banner, which makes it look very disjointed. Also, I'd recommend making the boundaries less linear and a bit more organic looking.
My problem is that I am artistically inept, I have no idea how to organically merge elements.
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You could always try to learn. There are both books and websites -- and college classes, actually -- on the topic.
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Blayne Bradley
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Anyone know how to get it so that my background image resizes so its the "fullpicture" and not just whatever your screen resolution allows and resized to be smaller automatically?
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You could always try to learn. There are both books and websites -- and college classes, actually -- on the topic.
Do I really have to answer this? Like I have school man and not alot of money, and a whole book on OpenGL and Java Cryptology applets to read first before investing in anything else.
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You could, instead of playing a game for an hour or so, read a couple online articles on the basic principles of graphic design instead. Do this one day a week, and spend one other hour a week playing with the things in the articles, and you'll never regret the time invested.
I'm completely serious about this. This is how you'll learn things.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You could always try to learn. There are both books and websites -- and college classes, actually -- on the topic.
Do I really have to answer this? Like I have school man and not alot of money, and a whole book on OpenGL and Java Cryptology applets to read first before investing in anything else.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program. I'd recommend putting each distinct element into it's own layer and playing around with layer masks to handle which parts show at any given location. You can get most blending you'd need with masks, and there are a lot of tutorials about them online.
If you don't like GIMP, check out Paint.Net. It is windows only, and in my opinion it isn't as good at editing images, but it is reputed to have an easier user interface.
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My eyes, they bleed. That background is awful, and the purple font just makes it worse. Also, tables? That's so 5 years ago. Divs are the way to go now. Check out w3schools if you need help with coding.
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If you really want to keep the background, I'd suggest playing around with font colors and finding one that contrasts with it more. Maybe white? Right now it's especially hard to read when the writing intersects with the boundary lines.
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Blayne Bradley
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White doesn't seem to work, I think I need a dark colour.
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I notice that you changed the background to an image of some sort of map. While this could work in theory, the actual image absolutely dominates the page in a way no background should.
If you like this image and want to keep it, I'd recommend toning down the brightness and saturation a bit, and setting the opacity to around 75% at most.
Also, I'll second the opinion that you should really look into a css based design using divs rather than a tabled layout.
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Blayne Bradley
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I "am" experimenting with CSS, divs is something I'll try out later once I make it to that particular part of my courses. Something involving Javascript.
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I can't recommend the w3schools link that was posted earlier enough. Seriously, spend a little bit of time reading up on the css section and looking at some of their example. It's actually fairly easy to get a somewhat decent looking site out of it, although it's going to take some fiddling with.
I really suggest that you just check this out on your own rather than waiting to get around to this sort of thing in whatever courses you are looking over for this. Again, the w3schools site is really, really useful for the material that it covers and is generally a really great place to look as a first reference in my experience.
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Blayne Bradley
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I do go to that site pretty often. Just to clarify I think the above link is incorrect.
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Divs really aren't that hard to learn, and I think it would be much easier to start designing with them rather than learn tables and then have to relearn web design with divs.
And what does javascript have to do with divs?
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One more piece of advice: don't make people scroll horizontally unless there is a really, really good reason (I can't think of any) behind it. It's really, really annoying.
Check your local library and see if they have CSS Web Design for Dummies or one of the other Dummies books that have CSS info. Go to Dummies.com and search for CSS to get the titles. I like the Dummies books for simple instruction. ;-)
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Blayne Bradley
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Scrolling Horizontally? You mean vertically, my page doesn't scroll horizontally on my computer.
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On your computer. Most users won't have screens that wide.
It's a rule of thumb that you want to design for 1024x768 or 800x600, even today, or else -- once you know how -- set up the site so that the width of the user's screen is dynamically taken into account by the design.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: On your computer. Most users won't have screens that wide.
It's a rule of thumb that you want to design for 1024x768 or 800x600, even today, or else -- once you know how -- set up the site so that the width of the user's screen is dynamically taken into account by the design.
And again, this is something that's fairly easy to accomplish with a CSS based layout.
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Blayne: what I see is a huge map background (on top of purple!) with a banner on top, a table cell with links, a table cell with information (the abbreviation for John McCain's home state of Arizona is AZ, not AK) and your banner2.jpg is way over to the right, where I have to scroll to see it. What is the purpose of that image, BTW?
Also, now that I'm looking at your source code, your alt text says that your banners are banner ads. They're not really ads, just banners.
I haven't used iframes, but your code says it's got a width of 1500 - could that be the problem?
I'm viewing it on a laptop with 1280x800 screen resolution.
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Has some serious flaws in itself, but there you go. Oh, and the color scheme was chosen by someone with more of a design eye, but there are sites out there that can show you complimentary colors to go with other colors you know you want.
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Blayne, have you considered taking a layout that's already done and modifying it for your use? I've done that in the past and found it a valuable way to learn web layout.
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Same here. That's why I borrowed a template and just changed the fonts and colors.
http://www.oswd.org/ (open source web development) has a lot of free web layouts, as well. Not as pretty or as complicated as CSS Zen.
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quote:Originally posted by Rappin' Ronnie Reagan: Tables used for layout. I know that tables have other purposes.
That's exactly what I meant. Any designer who thinks tables for layout is an archaic solution replaced by CSS clearly has zero real world experience.
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Are you referring to some specific "real-world" situation you have experience with? Tell us more!
I'm still a CSS newb, but every designer I've talked to in the last year (all from various production and freelance gigs - "real-world" to me) has repeated the mantra:
"Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...and nothing else."
quote:Originally posted by Wonder Dog: Are you referring to some specific "real-world" situation you have experience with? Tell us more!
I'm still a CSS newb, but every designer I've talked to in the last year (all from various production and freelance gigs - "real-world" to me) has repeated the mantra:
"Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...and nothing else."
Try loading a page using positional CSS in, say, IE 4. Now try testing the page in several different mobile browsers, engineered between one and three years ago. Whee!
Designers who claim "tables are [only] for tabular data..." are living in the designer dream world where everyone uses FF2+, everyone's screen res is 1024x768, everyone uses a Mac with a 5k font folder.
Now go examine the code for some major retail websites. Start with Amazon.com, Buy.com, Bestbuy.com, Target.com, eBay.com, and Walmart.com.
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You'll get no fight from me. I totally understand that you have to use whatever tool gives you the most consistent/less expensive results.
Thanks, eros - I see your point. It's funny how (some) designers can be so dogmatic...
... and it would be nice if we lived in a world where all browsers rendered XHTML/CSS identically... (Yet another example of how the web is broken.)
I would advise those learning to create web pages these days to get a solid understanding of XHTML/CSS... it seems like it will be boss until we re-write the web.
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A fair bit of web design can be for applications or company internal websites where you DO know that everyone is using a reasonably standards-compliant and recent browser, so in cases like that you might be able to adhere to CSS for layout.
Retail websites are a good example of where you want to avoid minimum browser requirements if you can, though. You want money even from the people using Windows 95 and Netscape 4.7. (Actually I can't remember if that's a realistic OS/browser combination.)
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quote:Originally posted by Wonder Dog: Are you referring to some specific "real-world" situation you have experience with? Tell us more!
I'm still a CSS newb, but every designer I've talked to in the last year (all from various production and freelance gigs - "real-world" to me) has repeated the mantra:
"Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...Tables are for tabular data...and nothing else."
Try loading a page using positional CSS in, say, IE 4. Now try testing the page in several different mobile browsers, engineered between one and three years ago. Whee!
Designers who claim "tables are [only] for tabular data..." are living in the designer dream world where everyone uses FF2+, everyone's screen res is 1024x768, everyone uses a Mac with a 5k font folder.
Now go examine the code for some major retail websites. Start with Amazon.com, Buy.com, Bestbuy.com, Target.com, eBay.com, and Walmart.com.
Ah.
I held on to Netscape 4.7 for years, but seriously. Anyone who still has IE 4 is using a computer that is about to explode from sheer age.
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