jesford

Background Image

2009-06-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

For some reason my background image does not load sometimes. It should look like this.
Click on the image above. This will open the image(which is being stored on my Festival Website) and then refresh my blog. The background should then load.
Does anyone know why this is the case?

Impracticalities of blog layout.

2009-06-11T05:59:00.000-07:00

Ok so this is kinda killing me. Every time I post a cool images(i do love my cool images) onto this blog site i can't see the damn thing cos the column is only 210 px wide. Who the hell designed this thing??? ok so that may have been me. i do like the aesthetic. but every time i post a cool image a little piece of me dies.

Making of the background...epic saga

2009-06-11T05:27:00.000-07:00

Is this blog supposed to be about my website's development? I think so.... oh well. I have to share the most amazing images I found on flickr there is this dude who takes a series of photos from the one similar vantage point then rather cleverly aligns them so they share a prominent visual line thus they look sort of form one images as an entire composition. Here what do you think?

(click the link to see a full size image; so worth it)This last image I spent ages and ages touching up in photoshop to use as my floating blog background. Then after getting it up there I decided i didn't like it. Yes, I just wasted all my time AHHHH. But i'm happy with my final image so it's all good!
The image below is of one of my attempts to get the background to work. At this point I was thinking of tilling the background ie background-repeat:vertical; ect

Then I decided that the strength of the colours was too distracting to the rest of the content so I added the opacity to the layer in Photoshop before flattening the image.

I was pretty happy with the effect but the tilling still looked pretty sad. So I fixed the position. However the image itself was still quite destracting and didn't relate particularly well to the actual content. Therefore....

the apealing thing about this image for me is the focus. Everything has been arranged around the girl who is the focal point of the image. I have then gone and placed my content column right through this focal point
.... the rest they say is history.

2009-06-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

Things That I would like to change in current Blogger layout:

Background image

Want the actual blog elements centred within the page and the entire element to be thinner, however still want a black background to this portion.

The secondary elements Followers and Blog archive to become less obtrusive to the entire layout

Is that too ambitious? I’ll give it a try; wish me luck

WEBSITE COMPLETE

2009-06-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have finally finished my website!

Josh's Website

Where's my homepage???

2009-05-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

For some reason my website was not navigating to my homepage and I could not for the life of me work out how to get it to do so. I have a mate who is a tutor for Web Engeneering so I hit him up for some kind of explaination. He said the server will automatically navigate to index.html . Once i'd changed my homepage to index.html it loaded up and the website is complete. YAY

Publishing to Web

2009-05-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

The website is finally working in Mozzila. The time came to upload it to the web. When I first got the GMail accound and Blooger account I also signed up for a free webserver site. with this already sitting there waiting I just had to upload my files to their site....somehow. I wasn't sure exactally how but i knew it involved something to do with FPT. Once I found the control panel of the webserver they had link to download a FTP Client. It's a one month tiral; I should be all finished in one month so i did it. It's simply a matter of log into the web server and then drop and drag.
The first image is of the tab which loads up the web servers content.

The second image is of the tab which you drag you computers files from.

Please make me a Navbar

2009-05-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

The old navbar....... what a pain. Initially I wanted to have a navbar which had a pop out menu for each tab. I'm still hoping to be able to do this. Below is my ideal.

However I have gone to a number of sites that have templates for these types of navbars and they appear relatively simple. Such as the one below.

Can you read the text there???? "three steps to install" THREE why didn't I just do that? Cos I like making life hard for myself. I have not been able to find one that has a vertical navbar. the one that I did find who had a vertical option was impossible to read and I could not integrate with my current layout.

First navbar victory

2009-04-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

this has been so much fun! At this point I'm just trying to get my vertical navbar to work. I do have grander ambitions for my navbar however at thispoint i'm going to take whatever small victories I can get. I have basically followed the template given by Geoph our lecturer for the navebar.

I was good as his navbar for the online lecture was a vertical one and the one i wanted was also. It was just a matter of resizing the button sizes to fit the jpg image i had for a background. Because all my buttons were different heights I had to reshuffle them.

hover joys

2009-04-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

The next thing I really want in my navbar was a black box to pop up around the button when i hover my mouse over it. I had read in the WebDesign text hover command for the css styling where a background colour could be changed at hover. I simply coppied this and instead of a background colour change i used a black border of 1 px which i had seen done on the online lectures many many times. too easy.

Thats' it working in my webpage navbar.

Website Background

2009-03-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

I can't beleive how long it's taking me to get this website background right. I started in photoshop. played around with my files size unit I got it reasonable close to what it needs to be. Then I decided I wanted a nice clean vector line with a gradient fill for my background. However I only know how to do this in Illustrator. So i built it in Illustrator. But my canvas size is only right in photoshop and for some reason i can't get it right in Illustrator. SmartObjects to the rescue. I had heard about these mythilogical items however until stubbing upon the now i never understood how they worked. I've finally after what seems like the best part of two days got this thing sorted.

Web Design:Design Reference

2009-03-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

5 Sites for examples.
http://kringas.com/projects/index2.html
http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/aaissue.php
http://www.folkfestival.asn.au/
http://www.archdaily.com/
http://nga.gov.au/Home/Default.cfm
http://www.archmedia.com.au/

Characteristics.
1. In terms of navigation the wave mouse over link and a list drops down is good. Makes navigation fast and you can scroll through to find the most appropriate option without committing to an option.

As for National Gallery Site.

2.
As soon as you enter the site there are clearly marked links organized in to most commonly wanted options.
3.
The vast expanse of space combined with the reduction of initial links and images draws the eye to that which is there. By not having an entire plethora of information thrown at you initially you can easily select the correct link and move to the specific area you desire. The disadvantage to this type of arrangement is whatever you want to find you are going to have to navigate to a specific area before you can reach your final destination. ( as for the Kringas Architects website image above).
4.
Once a navigation link is selected it opens to a page specific to link. Containing specific images and information. I mean this more in terms of navigation.
5.Left aligned links with the text running up the page. (As for cropped image; left)

6.Background colour is carried through under the text. Allows better continuity throughout pallets. See the National Gallery screengrab above.
7.Considering if the site is a liquid site or not. If the site is liquid to a certain point but then scrolls. Do we scroll to left/right eg 920 ppi. Do we scroll up and down. At this point I think I will have the page as a set size and links will navigate you around as opposed to scrolling down.

2009-03-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

Ok so flickr is my new best friend. I went there;punched in Folk Festival and got a whole swag of the coolest images EVA, yes thats right EVA. here r a few goodies.

Folk Festival Decicion

2009-03-08T05:43:00.000-07:00

Much as my decision for the Blogger blogging service my choice of the Folk Festival website was perhaps not as well justified as I may have liked. "I am a man of passion!!" the point is if I choose a festival which is lame in my eyes then my eyes will find themselves shut when I try to go and make the website. Therefore I have chosen the Folk Festival. end of discussion. all of my alter egos can just shut up cos thats the end of the debate. Just as proof that I've chosen the most intriguing site here is a video which they have embedded in every page of the site as a kind of footer.

Initial Style choices

2009-03-06T05:53:00.000-08:00

Ok so I've been doing a little bit of searching online for a few possible design aesthetics for my website. I've found a couple of killers. One in particular belonging to one of my employers.

did u miss it??? that's it. just the vertical nav bar and the images along the bottom. So simple. I love it. (if you think that's cut down to the essentials u should see his architecture!)

Yay I have a blog!!

2009-03-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

Well I need a blog. I would like to claim some kind of genius with regard to my selection of Blogger however i really can't. Basically I realise that many people use blogger so the general tools for blogging must be reasonable. Seeing as my website is going to be as minimalist as is reasonable possible the "minima" blog theme template within the blogger site is perfect for my blog. Another good reason is I have just signed up for a Gmail account and blogger is really easy to set up once this is the case.

First blog

2009-03-01T19:27:00.000-08:00

This is my first blog eva.