It's a Wonderful Internet.

Because we were talking about flash the other day, and because it's nearly Christmas, and because interactive books are just nifty, here's a link to a story told through flash 'It's a wonderful Internet'.

We Feel Fine.

"We feel fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale" according to their mission statement. It's a database of several million human feelings from all over the world that have been collected from various blogs. Every 10 minutes the system searches newly posted blog entries for sentences such as "i am feeling" or "i feel". It then records the entire sentence as well as other information including the age and geographical location of the blogger as well as the weather conditions at the time of blogging, saving around 20,000 feelings each day. It saves all of this in a database which you can then search through in a number of ways including searching for a specific feeling or by country, age, or weather conditions etc, or you can just randomly click on the screen (each coloured dot represents a blog sentence and each square will take you to a picture).

I thought it was a really interesting idea and nicely presented. Obviously some of the posts aren't particularly interesting but there are some that really made me think and wonder what the hell the blogger was actually writing about considering it was taken completely out of context! (if you really want to find out you can just click on the post and you'll be taken to the blog entry in its entirety)


Interesting stuff.

Stop Motion.

This is my attempt at stop motion for our animation class. It's the result of hours of painstaking monotonous work (I kid you not!) And you know, if this message reaches just one person, then all the hard work will be worth it :p
I really liked watching everyone else's work and think we did a pretty decent job considering no one had ever done it before. So, huzzah!

I've decided to make a portfolio site for Internet authoring so I can showcase aaaaaall my marvellous work...which I have yet to begin creating. I know there's quite a few people doing the same and so they might find the following links useful. They're two articles giving tips on creating successful online portfolios and pointing out whats generally best to avoid.

The Ultimate Portfolio
Creating a Successful Online Portfolio

Web Pages that suck.

I came across a site called 'web pages that suck' whose intention is to help educate people about good web design by showing them lots of examples of very bad web design! You could spend hours looking through them all but i decided to post a couple of links to my favourites.

Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven. I'm pretty sure that Jesus would smite whoever created this mess, if he still had the use of his eyes after viewing the site that is. There is no consistency in the 'design' of the site, each page looks completely different, but is guaranteed to be just as hideous as the one that came before it.
Yvette's. This is just awful, make sure the volume is up.
Douglas County Sheriff's department. This site is amazing. And the accompanying music blows my mind.
Havenworks Bad!
Saman Zerin Designed by the only one Hungarian magician who appeared a real car.
Franz Who is Franz? I don't think I ever want to know.
VF Designer Designer??
Hosanna "The most beautiful pages on the WWW". I disagree. I can't read anything on this site. The only thing I really caught was the picture of a dog with wings, which I found so terrifying I just had to leave.


Some more fun ways to waste time online:
Neave.com A website by interactive designer Paul Neave. There's some interesting things to do here including a television channel hopping thingy. Its weird because it's something I do all the time when I'm actually watching TV even though I find it pretty annoying, but this had a strange kind of surreal quality to it. And there's some great clips from old movies thrown in there. I spent a good while flicking through the different channels and I'm not entirely sure why.

Make a snowflake Why risk your life using a real scissors to make pretty snowflakes when you can just do it on the interweb.

Don't Click It An Internet without mouse clicking? Based on the theory that moving the mouse between clicks just results in precious wasted seconds.

Crayola.

Whilst looking up kids toys on google, as one does, I came across the crayola website. I really like it, probably because it's designed to be used by children, but I'm not ashamed of that. It's nice and colourful and there's lots of stuff going on. There's lots of movement what with the nifty buttons and links, so I don't get bored too easily. Just don't hover the mouse over the annoying little girl. "move mouse here to listen", I should have known better. Other than that I like the site. It's neatly laid out and really easy to navigate with lots of easily identifiable links, so I don't get lost. It's very interactive with lots of really fun activities for children.

And I'm only an animated button and a click away from 'crayola digi-color' : because using a real pen and paper is overrated.
A fun waste of time.

What the Helvetica? (sorry)

So who would have thought that something as 'simple' as a matter of typography could spark such a heated debate. Personally its not the kind of thing that I would lose a lot of sleep over; I feel that you can use whatever typeface you want (within reason) as long as it suits the message that you're trying to convey. As the typographer and graphic designer Wim Crouwel said;
"Helvetica was a real step from the 19th century typeface. ... We were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved. It should be neutral. It shouldn't have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface."

I myself quite like helvetica.

Did it really "scrape the crud" off the filthy old typefaces that came before it? If graphic designer Michael Bierut asks you this question then there is only one possible answer: Hell yes.