Haiku

http://fmundergrad.hunter.cuny.edu/~kimseyd

Website I Like: steampowered.com

If my computer is on, then I’m logged into Steam.  It’s that simple.  The Steam website is by far the one that has spent the most time opened on my desktop, always tucked in the bottom right corner of my screen.  The site is well organized, clean, and sleek, with a simple color scheme that doesn’t distract from the information presented.  Tabs direct you to different sections of the site, including the store, news, forums, support, and community sections.  The store page lets you see what games are being featured because of new releases or sales, and lets you see lists of games organized by what’s been recently released, what’s selling best, what’s coming soon, and what’s currently on sale.  You can also search for specific games, or browse by genre.  The community section lets you view what games your friends own, what they’ve been playing, and what they still want to get.  The news page features announcements on upcoming or newly released games, as well as updates and patches to existing ones.  Every page is presented in a clearly organized manner, information is placed in order of importance and boxed together accordingly, and the chosen font is highly legible.  As for ways to improve the site, a greater degree of flexibility in how you view your own game and friends lists would be appreciated.  Perhaps if these could be grouped into their own designated subfolders, the information would be easier to navigate.  For those of us who own hundreds of games, anything that can make organizing them easier is a huge advantage.

MoMA Print/Out

I was unable to make the trip to the Museum of the Moving image, and so went to the Museum of Modern Art instead.  I visited the special exhibition Print/Out, which gathered together hundreds of digital and screen prints, text based posters, and other graphic art pieces from dozens of artists.  The first piece that caught my eye as I entered the exhibit was a series of prints by Martin Kippenberger.  They were large scale copies of photographs that depicted sculptures made out of destroyed paintings.  The artist described this as appropriation of appropriation and a sort of “double kitsch.”  In another area, an interactive installation had been set up.  Museum visitors photocopied images of lamps onto semi-transparent paper and affixed them to cube shaped wooden frames with light sourced inside them to create real lamps.  One room featured several large posters printed with phosphorescent ink.  The lights would alternate switching on and off every 60 seconds, the darkness making the barely visible ink glow brightly and reveal the images and text.   The exhibit included many examples of works utilizing layout design elements such as grids, proximity, and alignment, many of which were text based and made use of a great variety of fonts to differing effect.  Some pieces juxtaposed many font styles and sizes to evoke emotion or feeling, or simply to highlight the interaction of the text.  The best piece by far, however, was one by Rirkrit Tiravanija.  It was a timeline of his life and work over several years, depicted with a huge variety of different print and text techniques in a giant scrolling piece covering an entire wall.

In Camera Edit: Public

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWI5744eM0k

Design I Like: Homestuck

Homestuck is an ongoing webcomic created by Andrew Hussie on April 13, 2009 that makes fantastic use of art, text, and web design.  It features both hand-drawn and photo-manipulated static images, as well as animated gifs, flash animations, and musical elements.  These are accompanied by text reminiscent of text-based adventure games, such as > Enter name. and > Examine room.  This is meant to give the reader the feeling of advancing through a game rather than simply reading a story.  

Dialogue between characters is facilitated through separate text windows designed to appear as instant-message conversations, furthering the game-like aspect.  The comic itself is drawn in a several different styles: a highly iconic sprite-based style for most of the game-like interactions, a more realistically proportioned style for action and key narrative moments, and a loose scribbly style for some moments of humor.  The different art styles reinforce the nature of the events taking place, whether they are serious, humorous, informative, etc. 

The iconic artwork also makes the numerous characters easy to identify and differentiate.  Each character has a unique silhouette and features, as well as both a symbol and color they associate with.  In addition, the characters each have their own distinctive typing quirk and type in their own associated color (examples: ALL CAPS, no caps or punctuation, L33T SP43K, aLtErNaTiNg CaPs, iNVERTED cASE, etc.), which makes determining who is saying what during dialogue exceedingly easy and intuitive. 

Apart from the artwork and text, the comic makes fantastic use of layout design, using the website itself to enhance the narrative.  While the panels and text commands are presented front and center, the dialogue is collapsible and hidden behind a spoiler tag style button.  This differentiates the dialogue from the main text of the comic and adds to the interactivity between the reader and the comic.  Over the course of the comic, several walkaround style flash-based games have been embedded into the narrative, allowing the reader to take direct control of a character and move them around and have them interact with a virtual environment.  These flashes take the video-game motif of the comic to a literal level. 

During a segment of the comic that lasted several months, the website layout was used to an even greater extent with the inclusion of the banner space.  A second set of narrative events was depicted in this space simultaneously with the rest of the comic.  This allowed for three different narratives to take place on a single page of the comic: one in the main comic space, one in the dialog box, and one in the header. Soon after making this change, the author began making use of HTML’s alt attribute to add additional text to the comic which could be viewed by hovering the cursor over the header.  By taking advantage of the flexibility of web design, Homestuck expands its narrative space in new and unique ways for the benefit of the reader.

Stamp Art Assignment

Mr. Horrible Warped Baby Bird Potato Head