Here is my first idea…I am thinking that I would like to create a site for cancer for women. I would like to do this because my grandma passed away from cancer a few years ago and I feel like I would be doing it for her.
The second would be something towards the Humane Society. I feel that animals are sometimes helpless creatures and that people need to treat them with more respect and love. It would be towards the effect of adopting more animals and less abuse.
I read an article awhile back about Andrew Stafford, a web designer who is most famous for producing the site UnderstandingDuchamp.com. First I chose to read this article for two reasons. One, I do not know much about website design and therefore read an article talking about websites. Two, Marcel Duchamp is one the most interesting and controversial artists that I enjoy and was thrilled to read about someone elses take on his work. After the first sentence I had already began to like this Andrew guy, he has indulged himself in to the so called Large Glass work of Duchamp as have I. The actual title is called the The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. The piece is so baffling that even the title does it no justice. Andrew’s basic design for the website revolved mostly and maybe solely around this piece of art. He wanted to design the rest with a cocise and coherent narrative desription of each piece of work with some type of animation that accompanied the pieces. One of the very interseting things I found about this site, is it took almost four years to complete. That was a lot more time than I had thought it would take to make a website, but then again it is a piece of art in its own way, and artists can take a lot more time than four years to do their work. The way that Andrew added motion and interactivity whithin the site makes a better connection to Duchamp’s art. Since some of Duchamp’s pieces were mobile the site its self then has to incorporate that in it as well. Engaging the viewer in the website is the very essence of Duchamp’s art, making the viewer’s imagination determine what each piece means. There is much content on the website itself. I took a look at the source and was surprised to see that there was less code and html than I was expecting.The site is broken up into a time line of Duchamp’s life and work and is easily to navigate through.
Andrew Stafford is a self taught designer, but not so much graphic designer but more a content guy. He achieved success only through hard-fought trial and error, which in the end isnt that what life is, just a big game of trial and error. He learned much of his website designing through a website called The Aspen Web archive . He had a lot of html practice with this website. The best way to create and design a unified website is to have good problem solving skills and great software, and in Andrew Stafford’s case it was Flash. He had to learn Flash from scratch to produce this website, and in my own opinion this is why it probably took that long to create. Once he learned how to use Flash inside and out, he began to learn the little hidden tricks and better ways to accomplish tasks, just like in most design programs. He did have outside help from his friends that where program editors to better help Andrew understand the software. For the time being Andrew does not spend that much time updating the site, maybe only a fee minutes to review access logs a few times a week. And the occasional thorough review a few times a year. This is what I love most about website design. The way that it can be ever changing and evolving with the times. Not saying that other pieces of art such as paintings can not be change or altered but it seems that it can be easier and more convenient to change a website. To end I will quote exactly what Andrew Stafford thinks makes a good web design. “To me, good design depends on meaningful content. For me, design is about finding the underlying structure of information, which exists apart from design. Uncovering that, and using it to guide desicions about layout, type, color, etc., makes for good Web design.” I can not agree more with him. If anyone would like to read the entire interview with Andrew Stafford it is on page 144 of Becoming A Digital Desiger book.
|
