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Webmaster Forum / Flash / Flash Site Design / September 2004New Flash Site, constructed with vectors.
[L=www.simonknowles.com]http://www.simonknowles.com[/L] Comments/suggestions greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance, Simon. I like the simplicity of the site. It gets the message out to the user with ease. Also, I like the pie button thing. Very Creative. However, I think you should put a few more transitions and animations in there. Nice Work. I don't like the title font though. It's sorta of wide and its kind of hard to read. Good Site though! Keep up the good work ! Sorry to take so long to reply I totally forgot about Easter ;/ I think you're right on both points and I'm currently working on a better look for the title straps. In the meantime... 100's of hits and hardly a peep! - Come on guys! Some criticism please! Nice, nice. May I suggest speeding it up slightly? It feels a bit like remedial course work. I'm consistently in the "want more now!" place. Porfolio doesn't seem to match the rest of the page. While everything else is very classy and chic looking, the porfolio stands out as a bit funky looking. Perhaps give it more of a "tech" edge? Great, great work. I'm impressed. Agreed, the folio could definitely do with a spruce up. It's a shame that when the bitmap content went in it slowed down a lot. Also, I've been playing around with putting something on the cover but nothing grabs... I think I'll take out a frame or 2 from the page turn and maybe make the images appear a few frames later to help it digest a bit smoother. Maybe re-texture the cover in metal as well. Thanks for the fresh eyes! Great work! I'm seriously blown away, this will be e-mailed to all the creatives in my address book. There is one thing that jars. The pie navigation, the hit area's need tweeking, when it rolls 'out' I want to follow it out and click on the location once it's 'out', but the hit area is only set to the position in the 'in' position. How exactly did you construct the pie system? Is it all single frame renders from a some 3d software? MovieClips of single frame renders triggered by invisible buttons? Hope this is constructive. Jolyon Thanks Joylon, very constructive. I finally got some time to make a few changes. The pie nav now works as suggested and a few frames have been rmoved to speed up playback. Same with the folio, but you can now avoid the folio altogether via the keyword links along the bottom. The flash menu is enabled so you can zoom into things now. The pie nav was animated & pre-rendered in Lightwave before construction out of vector tweens in Flash. The animated parts run along a single timeline and the mouse-overs control where you are on that timeline, there's probably a better way but I'm only starting to learn actionscript. Thanks, Simon. Flash websites have become very creative now days and very pleasing to the eye..but seems everyone wants to make the sites more illusive I mean opacity levels run rampant faint wispers of text hard to read or animations with the very links that one needs to navigate thru the sites are alway moving around hard to read or in some cases just catch long enough with your mouse to click on them...and fonts so small you need a magnifing glass to read them or the fonts are so weird as to need an interperter to unlock there meaning..I think websites are more becoming a work of art than they are functional, its a contest of technical savoy and artistic ability no matter that the content is the important factor, eyecandy is the rule..and I do enjoy eyecandy and seeing how they incorporate all that raw talent into a visual masterpeice but I think they need to concentrate on letting the visitor (customer) be able to find what he or she is looking for after all they are the ones who pay the bills lol. Sgt_Bolt - Your comments have really confused me... are you talking about my site in some sort of ambiguous way, or using this thread as an excuse for a general rant? lol The font used throughout the site is Gill Sans... since when has this been difficult to read?!! Even when I test at 1600x1200 it's all readable at this end. There was a small problem initially with the title font being a bit squashed, but that's fixed now. The 'K' menu and portfolio animation may be a little irksome on slower machines (sub-500mhz) - let us know if that's why you're having trouble. They are pretty functional though and hopefully help to convey the message that I can deliver realistic, interactive content at low bandwidth. "..I think websites becoming more and more a work of art than they are functional" I'm an artist so hopefully the site falls in between the 2. The only piece of pure 'eye candy' on the site is the Newton's Cradle animation that I use as a preloader, everything else has a very specific function. "...I think they need to concentrate on letting the visitor (customer) be able to find what he or she is looking for after all they are the ones who pay the bills lol." I am a illustrator who specialises in realistic vector artwork and accurate 3D visuals - is this unclear? I'm sure there are ways that I can better communicate my offer, please let me know if you have any suggestions. If artists/designers use Flash to demonstrate their artisitic & technical abilities on their own sites then I'm all for that because that's what they're selling at the end of the day. The lack of swf security prevents a great deal of fantastic client work being shown and we have to demonstrate things somehow. I think the problems you are talking about relate more to the proliferation of over-designed client work and in these cases I agree totally with what you are saying. I'd love to know if you have any specific comments or ideas relating to my site that would help to improve things but I fear that you have issues about the way things are going generally in the world of Web Design/Flash and this are clouding your objectivity. Simon. Gosh. This is going to sound awfully petty. You misspelled "author", and replaced it with what looks like "auther" on the bottom of the screen, as part of the copyright info. And you might consider compressing the graphics a bit more, perhaps simplifiying it ever so slightly, because on my Dual 2GHz G5 with 4G of RAM and a broadband internet connection it still jumps a bit...maybe it is my connection. Entirely possible. If you'd like I'll check it out on a T3 line. Overall, bravo. rlragona - Not petty at all! thanks for that. I've made the animations on the home page smaller to hopefully speed things up a bit more. Your connection should not affect the playback at all, it's all down to processor speed. I'm surprised it's a bit jerky on your hi-spec Mac though - did you have anything else open that could have been soaking up a bit of your processor's power? I've tried this on my old G4 dual 450 1GB Ram and it works only very slightly better than the 333mhz P3 box that my brother-in-law has. I think maybe Macs have more trouble viewing Flash (especially heavy vector stuff) compared to PC's :( Personally I think the site rocks the pants off of little girls (kidding of course). I am new to flash and only have 3+ years of designing site as a whole. I am totaly into the visual aspect of people show casing their talent. Especially when that is exactly what that person is trying to do. I hope to one day make something from scratch that is half that decent. I love graphics, I too try and design sites tat are visually appealing, I guess if you were trying to sell car parts that probably would have been the wrong approach. In any event - I am sitting here on a school PC (POS) and the site loaded fine. It's a 2.4 w-512 in the head, so I am not exaclty screaming with power. The bandwidth (not that that is an issus) is shared by 100000000 on what appears to be dial up.. Cheers, the site is fantastic !!!1 Oh yeah, one more thing Macs blow (ha ha ha kidding) Let me rephrase. The site is zippy as hell, loads before I see any type of preloader, and runs beautifully. And - the pie chart nav. system just feels slightly less than smooth. Is someone slipping something into my drink, or is that piece-slide-out effect something like a six or seven frame animation @ 12 fps? Either way, brilliant site. :) thanks guys. Yes, the slide-out is only about 6 frames now.. it's all tweened though, so hopefully in the future (as the average machine get's faster) I can extend it out again. Ha! I feel vindicated. The pie slide out is indeed only a few frames. I feel better now. And Macs rock. My G5 cut the render time vs. my old P4 3.2 by damn near half. I am a convert, despite being a diehard PC user for years. I was kidding about the MAC - they have a very nice product. I happen to prefer Window$ because that is all I used growing into the little turd I am now. Lot of changes, this one works much better on slower machines. New address as well - http://www.5kdigital.co.uk Thanks, Simon. |
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