Site structure, information flow, and other terribly boring stuff

4/13

Late for blogging day again! We can all thank Blizzard for enticing me to play World of Warcraft for patch 2.4, which while I should have anticipated this, swallowed my whole Wednesday.

But anyway, back to the important part of the project: The Guts. Yup, how data is going to flow through the veins of this website and allow my lovely users to efficiently find the information they need. Oh and also to make them see how fun and happy this film festival is going to be.

So after evaluating the current site at www.hraff.org.au, I decided that trying to access information on this site is like climbing through a crawlspace with multiple deadends, thus forcing you to try crawl back out. Backwards.

My solution to this is basically to shallow out the hierarchy, if that makes sense. That means maybe only three clicks to the information you need, and not ten with pointless animations in between. Also to not hide away film previews in the program guide, because they really are the main selling point for this film festival.

Just as a side note, I'm being awfully critical today because today is Zero Punctuation day (yay!). If you haven't seen Zero Punctuation before, see the latest game review here. The reviews are blindingly honest and generally absolutely hilarious.

So back to my site structure, here's a little something about how I'm going to try organise the information:

The home page will, like the current site, have a lot of buttons (I've reduced the number of them to necessity but still at least 6). Nothing new, but it's the way information is connected now that I hope to change. The long curved lines indicate that some categories will link back to other related information, such as the info on each city will link to the program guide for that city, making information far more accessible in a variety of formats. Why have information linking to other information? Because for example, clicking on Sydney may give your user information about the stalls and festivities there, but then your user may want to get the program guide from there. So without the link, it's *two* clicks to the guide rather than one. That's the theory I'm going by anyway.

The other change made to the structure versus the old layout is not needing to choose a city when you first open the website. Why? It's totally pointless for the kind of information available. Information such as trailers for the movies shouldn't require you to choose your city, and in reality, don't. In fact, I'm going to put them right there on the first page, links to trailers, because that's really the entire selling point of the whole festival, as mentioned earlier. While the layout and such should be bright and cheery, it doesn't mean that the issues being dealt with aren't heavy and still deserve an emotional response (it's a human rights festival! You can't change that). So in essence, I'm going for fun and happy but NOT frivolous. That, in itself, is a major challenge.

So currently all that's left is to finish constructing the site (frame is up, but css needs some work), test over the weekend on some family and friends, and other miscellaneous volunteers, and voila!

Will report back with a link to the site when it's in beta stage.

Game on @ ACMI

3/13

Turns out I missed posting day yesterday, but that was so I could write about my experience at the Game On exhibition at ACMI, which I had the pleasure of seeing this evening (just got in the door from seeing it).

The collection the curators had pulled together was amazing, some of this stuff I'd never even heard of let alone seen with my own eyes before. Firstly, one of the highlights was the arcade room at the entry. There were some really old school games in there, some of Taito's originals (yes, even *before* Bubble Bobble, which mind you was there but on a console). The machine that amazed me the most was the Space Invaders console which actually reflected the screen onto the viewing area, which had a multilayer backdrop (like, sky was far away and ground was closer). This I had not seen before, and my lovely game-loving boyfriend who came along had exclaimed that while he had seen the reflection technique used to increase the size of the screen, he had not seen it to project the game onto a colourful background.

It was a little disappointing to see some of the displays not working correctly, such as the Pong game not serving on P2's side, and many others shut down. The vast variety of other (and even multiple) consoles available made up for this though.

Some of the controls used in some of the exhibitions was beyond comprehension from a modern game design perspective. If anyone saw the Mecha game, they'd know exactly what I mean. Has anyone seen the kind of controls that are often depicted in mecha animations? Like, the dual joystick things? That's how you controlled this game, not to mention the myriad of other crazy buttons you had to work out how to use. To learn how to play properly, you'd have to read a novel-thick manual just to work out how to walk the damn thing properly. Even crazier than that (yes, it gets crazier) was the Train game. This game had train controls, and you had to get braking/acceleration right, and stopping at platforms. We got the most joy from throttling the control back and forth and seeing the little picture of people falling over come up.

I'd say the most popular games were Guitar Hero (hey, who wouldn't want to show off to those around you how to blitz a song in the bonus category on hard), and both the Wii consoles with Wii Sports and Sonic and Mario at the Olympics. To be honest, Sonic and Mario at the Olympics was a bit of a let down in my personal opinion. I don't ever think a Wii party game should require more than two panels of control explanations, let alone the eight that most of the games required. Also, despite having the buttons available on the remote and nunchuck, most party games are far more fun if they don't require actually using them (see: Wii Tennis).

The exhibition was overall really interesting and there was some really obscure stuff to see, even the number of consoles blew me away. I'd never have expected so many versions of the Nintendo, ever. The main issue with the exhibition was some consoles not working/games frozen (the number of Xbox consoles frozen was astronomical). Most definitely worth seeing, I'd allow at least three hours to see everything.

Site layouts

2.1/13

After evaluating some of the other human rights sites out there, such as http://www.amnesty.org.au/ and film festival sites such as http://www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au/, I wrote down the things that I thought would make a relevant site layout for this website. These I concluded were:

• colour crossovers, like when two transparent colours cross over.,
• block elements resting on each other, creating a visual dependency,
• border elements around all the main content frames, to unify the entire design.

The results of that kind of thinking were these:
Each of the points above have been respectively used in each layout. The result was awful: clinical, cold, and official. Which is nice when you want cold and clinical, but for something fun and exciting like a film fest, clinical is not the way to go.

As a complete turnaround from the terrible cold and dark of these layouts, I tried something new:

It's still a working progress but I'm liking it far more than the last three layouts, I want to artsy it up a bit (not too much of course, we're still trying to appeal to a wide audience!). A good sandy coloured texture would look good in the background methinks, will have to experiment with texturing.

Project 1 progress

2/13

So I've decided to make Wednesday as my weekly major blogging day. I've got a lot to tell you about!

First of all, logo creation has been a minor nightmare. The main issue I've been having is how do you conjure up positive images when you're thinking about human rights? I continually think of oppression and third world countries. Honestly other human rights arts film festivals around the world haven't done much better with their logo creation, if you click useful links at www.hraff.org.au, you'll see other human rights arts film festival logos. Honestly, none of them even tried to make a related logo (just plain text, aesthetic but nothing special), the only one that did in fact try was http://www.derhumalc.org.ar/main_en.htm and I can't help but find it rather cheesy. Obviously the current HRAFF logo has made a good attempt, and I would say it's the best out of the current bunch, but it doesn't really have the fun, despite having the edge.

But I guess everyone is having about the same problem as I am: how do you illustrate human rights, as an issue, as a positive thing?

Here are my initial attempts:
Nothing really came out of these iterations. I didn't mind the last one because honestly, it really didn't mean much and didn't get bogged down in the human rights thing, or the film analogy. It exhibits a unified design, and flows naturally. so I went with that and the product was this:






Still wasn't a fan of it. Just couldn't handle how much it looked like a Microsoft Office clipart decal. So I changed direction again and made yet another logo copysheet, and sadly this is where I'm currently at, waiting for something to pop out and slap me in the face and say "Look at me! I'm exactly what you want!"

After realising that the dove would be a good representation of universal peace, I decided to chop off that lovely wing type graphic and play with it. The top left iteration is the first result of that. I didn't mind it at first, it has an artsy kind of feel to it, and for some odd reason reminds me a lot of guitar hero graphics. If there were any decent images on the web of what I was talking about I'd link them, but for now you'll just have to trust me.

So I had a friend of mine look at the top left logo, and the feedback wasn't so good. He felt it was aggressive and dangerous, which honestly if it reminds me of guitar hero, it's probably true. From there the top right iteration came, which is much friendlier but I just don't really feel it. It probably needs some more reworking. I then decided to resimplify and go with the middle right and bottom logos, which sadly looked more like logos for a travel agency than for human rights. In a last desperate attempt to make a cool looking and fun human rights logo, I slapped that wing logo on a film square and that's currently where I'm up to with logo design. Time to advance with a colour palette and web layout, I'll come back to this when I've got more important things underway. I certainly think I've advanced but it's just not what I'm after yet.

Introductory post

1/13

First of all, welcome to my online journal for MMD3305! I hope to periodically copy the work I do from my hard copy journal, post clippings of interesting things I find for inspiration, and to keep a weekly update going on the progress of my work. Summaries of the briefs given in class will also be uploaded.

Why is this blog called Thirteen Posts? Well, after pining over a name for this over a week, I decided finally that the name should reflect my goal for the blog: maintaining a weekly update system for the progress of my work. The other posts thrown in between should be intermediate findings, less of a planned journal entry and more of a sporadic desire to post something inspiring.