Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Disability Scoop reports that the feds are looking to boost accessibility. They are working on the 508 guidelines and are asking for feedback and input. Got some to give?
Flexibility: A Foundation for Responsive Design is at Script Junkie.
Peter-Paul Koch talks about why the new iPad’s retina display is not good for the web in The iPad 3 and Moore’s Law.
If you are a Flickr user you know that the online image editor Picnik that was integrated with Flickr is going away. What’s a photographer to do when all they want is a quick crop or to rotate a photo while looking at Flickr?
If you are a Google + user, you’ve probably noticed that the Picnik technology has moved into Google + and can be used to edit photos there. That’s nice, as long as you’re a Google + user.
There are alternatives to Picnik.
FotoFlexer will work with photos from Flickr (and Picasa and Facebook and other places) and will do pretty much what Picnik does.
PicMonkey was built by some of the folks who worked on Picnik, and does much of the same type of image editing. The hang-up right now is that it only works on photos you have stored on your hard drive. Not that having a free online tool to edit photos isn’t fabulous, but it needs to allow you to choose photos from online storage places and then save the changed image back to its original location.
Are you aware of others that make sense as replacements for Picnik?
I just finished with a photography class. My goal for the class was to master the settings on my camera so I could get control over depth of field. I wanted to be able to make certain parts of an image sharp, while others were blurry.
The day class ended, I heard about this new Lytro camera. It’s a light field camera. WikiPedia says, “A light-field camera, also called a plenoptic camera, is a camera that uses a microlens array to capture 4D light field information about a scene.”
Click around in this image by Mugur Marculescu to see what it does. I am determined to be able to do this sort of trickery with f-stops and aperture settings.
The Daring Librarian has a lot of material about QR codes on Flickr and her CC license allows for use with attribution. Check it out.
As I mentioned, I want to give the new WordPress Image Gallery a try. I gathered up some photos from the 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference to use as an experiment.
The results? Easy to set up, easy to edit, easy to add titles and alt text. I don’t like that the thumbnails open in a separate window and that the Back button has to be used to return to the gallery. Putting only two thumbnails in each row would make the images large enough that users wouldn’t be so prone to click for a larger view, but still, that’s a drawback.
Photography has undergone many changes in its relatively short history. For the first 150 years it was a purely analog art form in which latent images were exposed on to film. The technology advanced but the general principle remained the same.
During the 1990’s the digital camera started to take shape. Although this has made photography much more accessible to people (the most common digital cameras are the ones built into mobile phones) the principles have remained the same. Photographic technology has changed but the resultant work is very similar to that which can be created using analog equipment.
Image by cogdogblog on Flickr
However, we are now seeing some exciting new changes in the world of photography. You may already be familiar with one technology that has literally changed the way we see the world. It is the technology used by Google to create its Streetview images. 360 degree panoramic images from a moving vehicle that has now traveled along almost every single lane, road, street and motorway in the developed world and has also covered many areas of the developing world. However, this is not the only advancement in photography in recent years. Let us take a look at a few, starting with the “Streetview camera”.
This is the technological used by Google Street View. It is a camera that consists of 11 lens on a soccer ball sized sphere. The main camera used by Google is Immersive’s Dodeca (PDF) 2360 (PDF). It can record at 30 frames per second. The images are joined together to make the infinite and navigable image as seen on Google Streetview. This technology is not cheap though, camera retail at around $45,000 each. The mount and computer to process the images costs an additional $45,000 and you spend around $400 per mile of filming.
This new camera is based on the same principle as the Dodeca 2360. The main differences are that it is designed to be thrown in the air to take panoramic shots and it is also priced for the mass market. The camera is designed to capture an image when it is at the highest point in its flight. The ball has 36 fixed-focus cameras to capture the image. It utilizes an array of modern technology including an accelerometer so that it can predict the exact point that it will reach its apex and the casing is constructed with a revolutionary 3D printer. The biggest downside is that these cameras are very bulky. For more information on the Throwable Ball Camera see http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera.
Photojolo’s new photography concept consists of a 3.2 MP sensor. The key feature of the camera is that it allows you to take a double exposure, i.e., take two photographs on the same image. It is a way to layer photos to create a more artistic image. It is a little gimmicky and the same process can be done in good photo editing software. It is a very compact camera though and currently retails at $130. If you are looking for something a little different that you can carry with you at all times it is certainly worth a further look.
This is the a candidate to be the first commercially available 3D camcorder. It is currently a concept camera with a twin-lens that can film in 3D and take 3D photographs. The camcorder records in 1080p / 1080i AVCHD video. It can also take 3D macro images. The camera was announced by Panasonic in August 2011 and started to appear in shops at the end of October. It is retailing at around $3500, so you can now make your own HD movies in 3D.
This is the ultimate tool for one-eyed spies – the Prosthetic eye digital camera. This is no joke though. Tanya Marie Vlach may be the first person to have a digital eye installed. She lost one eye in a car accident and is currently raising funds to Grow a New Eye. The idea is the create a digital eye that will use Bluetooth wireless technology to transmit data to a computer. You can find out more about Tanya Vlach on her website http://tanyavlach.wordpress.com/
The new Phantom c1610 range video camera by Vision Research can take one million frames per second. What can you do with a million frames per second? Well, not a lot. To actually manage a million frames per second the images are so small that they can hardly be viewed with the naked eye. However, with fewer frames per second it can produce some stunning stop motion photography. The camera can be equipped with up to 96GB of high-speed memory to store the thousands of HD images required to create a stop motion film. You can see what the camera is capable of producing on Vision Research’s gallery, http://www.visionresearch.com/Gallery/. Poetry in Motion is certainly worth a viewing.
Lytro has developed a camera that literally takes photos in a new and revolutionary way. Rather than focusing at a fixed distance the Lytro captures the image across the entire light field. An image is made up of multiple layers which can then be individually manipulated. You can take a photo with everything in perfect focus and then chose which parts to blur later. Learn more on their website, www.lytro.com.
3D and dynamic panoramic photos are changing the face of photography. This change is driven entirely by advancements in technology. Digital storage is possibly still the biggest hurdle as HD cameras capable of taking hundreds of frames per second require a huge amount of storage space. Also processing demands a lot of computing power. As memory expands and computer chips get faster we are set to experience many new advancements in photography in the coming years.
Gary Dean is a full time photographer and part of the writing team on a popular free photo prints website. When not working with cameras he collects them and has a particular love of old folder cameras.
Designing for Emotion, written by Aarron Walter, is another of the brief but valuable books from A Book Apart. If you’ve read other books from A Book Apart you know they are high quality work from knowledgeable writers. This one is no exception.
With only 7 chapters and less than 100 pages to tell his tale, writer Aarron Walter gets right to it in a hurry. He explains what emotional design is and how it uses personality, humor, and positive experiences to meet human needs on web sites. Walter infuses the book with personality, humor and positive experiences, too, making it a delight to read. For example,
There’s a very practical reason that emotion and memory are so closely coupled—it keeps us alive. We would be doomed to repeat negative experiences and wouldn’t be able to consciously repeat positive experiences if we had no memory of them. Imagine eating a delicious four-pound log of bacon and not having the sense to eat another the following day. That’s a life not worth living, my friend.
That wasn’t the only remark in the book that made me smile. Walter does practice what he preaches.
He gives examples for each point he makes, giving the reader some real world examples to examine. In the chapter explaining what emotion design is, he points to Wufoo and Betabrand.
In the chapter on designing for humans, he talks about psychological principles that guide the emotional language and imagery web designers might employ. For example, “baby-face-bias”. Baby-face-bias triggers positive emotions with characters with large eyes, small nose and a pronounced forehead. It’s behind the successful imagery used by Brizzly, Twitter, StickyBits, and Walter’s own work at MailChimp. This chapter also talks about the use of contrast and aesthetics.
There’s a chapter on personality. Creating a website with personality gives users a sense of human-to-human interaction. He talks about personas and provides a detailed downloadable worksheet to help you create a design persona for your website. Online examples include Carbonmade and Housing Works.
In the chapter on emotional engagement, Walter talks about surprise, delight, anticipation, and priming. Examples in this chapter include Photojojo and the New Twitter. He discusses the idea of variable rewards from sites like Groupon, but I think the uncertainty of what will come next from the new app Siri on the iPhone 4S—which came out after this book was written—is a terrific example of baked in emotional engagement, surprise, delight and anticipation.
The next chapter is overcoming obstacles. This chapter deals with convincing users to click, sign up, complete the process and keep coming back. He discusses game theory, bribery and a sense of achievement. Mint and Dropbox are the examples described.
In the chapter called Forgiveness, Walter talks about what to do when you screw up, and how to help people overlook your shortcomings. Flickr is the example he uses in this chapter.
The final chapter is about risks and rewards. It talks about the risks of getting started with emotional design, and the rewards. CoffeeCup Software is cited as an example of how to start small with a limited time idea to see if it works. He describes the risk of starting a new site with emotional design in mind from the beginning. Designers can alienate users instead of making them feel good about a site with emotional design. Walter discusses some of those risks. He borrows the phrase progressive enhancement for those who want to work some personality into existing websites. The online example cites Blue Sky Resumes.
Finally, there is a list of resources for those who want to dig into the concepts from this book in more detail. The resources are genrally books about design principles, science, psychology, behavior, the human brain and user experience, but there are some online resources, too.
Summary: Brief but packed with useful concepts and concrete examples.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of Designing for Emotion (rating: 5 stars)