Chill Jill's Blog

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:12:15 +0000

The. Darker. Side. of. Love.

2009 By Jill Cook

A Map Made of a Word: Peace

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:04:05 +0000

Here’s a project I did last year. I made a map out of the word “peace” and each country (for the most part) is made up of the language that they speak. This now taught me how to add a PDF file! Wahoo!

click below to view the file!

Peace on Earth

Some Internet Statistics (From 1998)

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:00:56 +0000

Here are some statistics, they may be closer to the truth than you think! The internet is MASSIVE!

Estimated US consumer spending on online retail purchases during 1998 holiday season is $8,200,000,000
Estimated number of web pages, as of April, 1998: 320,000,000 (nevermind 12 years later…)
In 1998, 3.4 trillion e-mail messages delivered to 81 million e-mail users in the United States, says a marketing firm. That’s more than 6.5 million messages per minute (and again, this is 1998, 12 years later and that number has probably doubled.. scary)

Source: http://www.why-not.com/company/stats.htm

Sites I Want to Know More About

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:26:21 +0000

There are sites that you just don’t know how the coding is or how they did that or even why they did it! Here are some of mine!

1. SCRIBBLER

What a cool way of drawing. You draw a line, then it creates a drawing from that line. I want to know how they coded that when building the game! It’s super cool and very interesting! Plus, if you suck at drawing, you can fool everyone!

2. FOWA

I want to know how they made the foreground move without making the background move. Cool!

3. BLUE DOTS DESIGN

The white box, how did they make it 3D? Is it a graphic? And what about the items resting on top? Were they in the graphic as well or did lots of layering happen?

4. ELIXR

This site has some of the cleanest, simplest and very high quality graphics I’ve ever seen with little load time. I’m wondering how they managed that? It’s a very clean and simple website! Nice!

5. DAMIAN DI PATRIZIO

I always wondered how they made the slider go down with the page. It’s super convenient and looks awesome!

6. SIKKER

I want to know how they got the rest of the photos to go dark while the one you’re rolling over is bright. But when you go off all the images, they all go bright. Lots of rollover code I take it. Very classy and stunning.

7. EMILIANO RODRIGUIEZ

One of THE coolest portfolios I have ever seen! The sound effects when you roll over things are super entertaining, the graphics are cool. I want to know how he got transparent backgrounds when you select his different portfolios. It just appears on the same page and the animation is very cool when they appear. It is a very well done and clean site. I would like to know the coding behind it. Great job! He’s even done 3D renderings for Ipod and Porsche. Now that’s impressive!

Things to Stay Away From, Like Seriously

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:28:14 +0000

Here’s a website on bad website ideas so that you NEVER do them!

click here –> BAD WEBSITE IDEAS!

Usabilty Issues: Yes, its a BIG DEAL!

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:22:52 +0000

Websites, especially ones that advertise a company, should be well designed and make the customer feel encouraged to use that companies resources or products. Some websites out there, well, frankly they are just the opposite. Here are some sites that in my opinion, don’t quite make it and are hard to either look at and/or use.

1. BLACKWELL MOTORS

To start, the whole website is on the left hand side of the page and very badly constructed. There is so much going on that you don’t even know where to look. The logo isn’t well placed and the pictures are small. The graphics are very cartoony and not professional. This is a car dealership and it screams tacky, cheap and not worth going to! The song is quite annoying too, even if there is a pink elephant in it! This site needs some intense work!

2. MARTINSBURG POLICE DEPARTMENT

Next is a very painful to look at site that is supposed to represent policeman in Martinsburg. This gets a big thumbs down from me. The text is all different colours, sizes and fonts for one thing, and they are also wasting valuable space on the right hand side of the website! There are confusing and random lines and boxes everywhere! This is not user friendly at all and is really an embarrassment to the organization. The graphics are small and hard to read and the background is just not suitable and rather nauseating. Go figure, its designed by an Sgt.!

3. WIZZARDS TATTOO AND BODY PIERCING

The intro page is too close to the top, the buttons do not work unless you’re over the letters themselves and the music scares you! The background doesn’t work and distracts from the text. The font is too small and there are too many words. The bloody font is probably not the best choice for a place that should be clean. I don’t know about you but I would not want to get a piercing or tattoo there! They also spelt “wizard” wrong… kind of a big deal!

4. PROACTIVE CHIROPRACTIC

So, there are some type formatting errors going on here. First of all, the green, not so easy to read and really just hurts the whole professionalism of the site. The formatting in the centre is also a major problem. Seriously hard to read and very very long for an intro page. The graphics on the right are small and not sized right. They were not compressed right either. The office hours on the left are tiny and should be on a tab pertaining to hours an location. Is not appealing to customers and needs to be simplified and more professional looking.

5. HOSANNA1

This site may have to take the gold. At first glance, I really had no idea what was going on. There was so much I could not really tell what was being advertised. Other then the flying white dog in the middle, it was hard to find what they were selling. The background graphic just adds to the chaos of the text and badly designed animations. The text is all overlapping and there are so many links and words and its just a mess. It even froze my computer because there was so much information to load!

6. FABRIC LAND

Another hard to look at site. The bright green background is awful and the graphics right at the beginning do nothing for showing what is being advertised or what Fabric Land is all about. the boxes of different colours are not good and the photos are stretched and bad quality. Too many fonts and colours and animations used its very hard to find your way around. The Title at the top is “New Page 1″ .. not very professional and neither are the animations. It says their pages are updated weekly… they need to get into 2009 and revamp their site!

So there are the sites that I found to be very, very user frustrated not user friendly! I would like to redesign their sites immediately!

Building Games in Flash

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:21:14 +0000

Our class answered the question to Interactivity very differently. Lots of the games were created on Flash and I was very curious to learn how they did that! Here is a fantastic site that teaches you how to do lots of cool things using Flash! If you love games, check this out!

click here –> BUILDING GAMES IN FLASH

More Info on QR Codes! Check it!

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:16:08 +0000

QR Codes are a new way of using technology to our advantage and to send and receive information. This is a simplified and very easy to read explanation on why QR codes are used and what impact they have on society.

click here –> QR CODE INFO

10 Really Cool Flash Websites

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:02:28 +0000

So, websites can be made with lots of different coding and yes, Flash can even be used! Here are some really cool Flash websites to get you inspired. Check them out because they are really well done!

click here –> COOL FLASH WEBSITES

Need Flash Help?

chilljill — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:45:36 +0000

Recently we did a project in Flash and I don’t know about you, but Flash can be really fun to use. However, the coding can sometimes be difficult. Here is a great website with videos and all sorts of other cool stuff from experts of Flash. It has help for beginners, intermediate, and advanced Flash users. And the best thing is all the help on action script which is pretty much the backbone of Flash.

click here —> FLASH HELP