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Stealing the spotlight


ChrisHPZ

ChrisHPZ

Power User
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Last week, my career services advisor in college told me of a student event going on. What's going to happen here is that students in the Web Graphic Design and Multimedia Design degree program will set up a table where they can bring their computer and basically show off their stuff. Attending this event will be employers to which they can offer their opinions and maybe, if I'm lucky, offer internships or jobs. So, being the ambitious person that I am, I thought I would put together something in Flash that will hopefully get the attention of all the employers to my table and in my favor. The link is interactive. PS, please let me know if it takes awhile for this to load. The SWF movie is only 150K, but I know some of the people here are from the other side of the world. Oh yeah, the ENTER text is interactive.

http://cdemarco.net/splashscreen.html
 
Posting does not automatically give the poster a given for replies mate, i just replied because i have been there too, so as many if not all members here and out there in web world.
So hang in there and you might get the response you are so craving.
 
P.S.
I had a look at the page you created not my thing or boat floater, just me and web design stuff - but yeah nice job i couldn't do it.
 
ChrisHPZ said:
50+ views and not one comment? WTH?!?!?!
Click to expand...

51 now! Sorry Chris, I've been busy and I didn't even see your post. Just looked at the site now.I like that kind of flash presentation. Very well done. Nice fantasy font too.

I do have an opinion on the site itself. Small one. I don't like when the text is flush to the borders of the site like you have it on the left. It makes it hard to find a focal point on the page and makes your eye rove rather than settle down. And I think the line spacing is too much. IMHO

Otherwise, :cool2:


PS: a friend of mine adds a recommendation: "smaller font size for captions under image."
 
Last edited:
To be honest my favorite part of the site is the splash page...
But, Nice job with the animations and flash!
 
Ok before I critique it I would like to ask a question

Is this a flash animation as in built and animated in flash using Actionscript 3

or have you just imported a video from another application such as after effects and made the text a link. and exported that as a flash SWF
 
Hey ChrisHPZ,

First off, like others have said, very cool splash page. It's a strong background image and the subtle cloud animations are a great touch. I noticed that the loop of the clouds isn't continuous as they suddenly disappear and then reappear. One thought would be to have the clouds initially fade in and then fade out as they move off into the background. That way you'll have a smooth transition from the end of the loop to the beginning.

Your work portfolio site is very clean and easy to navigate. I also checked some of the other sites you've made and like your use of strong colors. I have a few suggestions that might help enhance the look you are going for. While a compartmentalized layout can work well depending on the setting, I've found that the most visually impressive designs tend to have at least some integrated visuals. For example, the header, banner, content, side bars can be weaved together with different effects and not kept completely separated in the design. Simply put...If you make your layouts less "boxy", your designs will appear more seamless.

Framing the website with a subtle background image can help structure your site and also add some visual flare. A very simple example of this can be seen with Gamespot.com where they use a gray banner on top that encompasses the header and navigation. Of course, there are many more creative ideas for backgrounds but this is just a simple example. They also use a dropshadow that runs vertically down the edges of the site to add a more 3-D feel.

Generally, I've found that the more a site pops with the effective and balanced use of shadows, gradients, glows, the more it grabs a user's attention. All of these techniques when used properly, keep a site from looking flat.

In the end, your portfolio site is a great start. Making it more attention grabbing will help you get you noticed and ultimately, hired :)

Hope this help,

Treydahn
 
Hoogle said:
Ok before I critique it I would like to ask a question

Is this a flash animation as in built and animated in flash using Actionscript 3

or have you just imported a video from another application such as after effects and made the text a link. and exported that as a flash SWF
Click to expand...

Hi Hoogle, ok this animation is all Actionscript 3. I don't even bother with the timeline anymore as it has a way of appearing choppy under certain browsers. I could certainly have done the animations in AfterEffects, but that would have introduced another problem. If I brought an AfterEffects video into Flash, at an incredibly HUGE file size, I would have had to find a solution to make the ENTER text a hyperlink. So for all intents and purposes, AfterEffects just wasn't necessary this time. The background graphic, I'll admit is not Photoshop nor do I think I could have done it in Photoshop. It comes out of an application called Terragen 2 which is a 3D graphics editor much like Maya 3D, but not nearly as expensive. The text is Photoshop though. Hoogle, if you would like, I'm more than happy to send you the .fla file or I can simply email you the code and assets I made to put this together. Your call brother:-)
 
Thank you Treydahn. I have to admit that I did want to go with more visuals in my site, however one of my professors suggested that I keep things minimal as in minimalistic design standards. And that doing so would improve my chances of getting hired by a design firm. Lord knows I've worked for it and am continually increasing my skill set. Thank you for the down-to-earth opinion on my website. That sort of thing doesn't happen very often. BTW, I did get a call in regards to a web designer internship position so hopefully something in my favor will come of it.
 
ibclare said:
51 now! Sorry Chris, I've been busy and I didn't even see your post. Just looked at the site now.I like that kind of flash presentation. Very well done. Nice fantasy font too.

I do have an opinion on the site itself. Small one. I don't like when the text is flush to the borders of the site like you have it on the left. It makes it hard to find a focal point on the page and makes your eye rove rather than settle down. And I think the line spacing is too much. IMHO

Otherwise, :cool2:


PS: a friend of mine adds a recommendation: "smaller font size for captions under image."
Click to expand...

Smaller font size, you think so? Ok, I can take care of that. About the text though. One of my problems is that I have a 25" monitor and I often design websites around that. WRONG ANSWER CHRIS_HPZ!!!!! On my monitor, the text isn't flush to the edges of the screen because my site is set to display everything inside a 1300px Width container selector. Maybe I can get away with cutting it down to say 1024px in width since most people have a resolution of 1366 X 768 on their monitor. Your comments and points are always taken Clare.
 
Thanks no I was more baffled on how you would have created it all in flash.

I thought you had made the graphics in flash and used action script to add blur, motion and the color changes.

That would have been a mammouth task and probably not possible to that level of animation lol.
Cool will look into that program seems to be able to do fractal animations would like to compare it to after effects .

Thanks for the tip
 
Actually the blur is Actionscript 3, it's a part of the filters package that allows for blurs, glows, gradient glows, drop shadows, and a few others. Below is the code that makes it happen while targeting a particular movie clip, in this case testEnter.

var glow:GlowFilter = new GlowFilter();
glow.color = 0x72FFFB;
glow.strength = 1;
glow.blurX = 25;
glow.blurY = 25;
testDesigns.filters = new Array(glow);

var dir:Number = 1;
testEnter.blur = 10;
var glowFilter:GlowFilter = new GlowFilter()
glowFilter.color = 0x72FFFB;
glowFilter.alpha = 0.5;
testEnter.filters = [glowFilter];
testEnter.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, enterFrameHandler);

function enterFrameHandler(event:Event):void
{
testEnter.blur += dir;

if ((testEnter.blur >= 30) || (testEnter.blur <= 10)) {
dir *= -1;
}

var filter_array:Array = testEnter.filters;
filter_array[0].blurX = testEnter.blur;
filter_array[0].blurY = testEnter.blur;
testEnter.filters = filter_array;
}
 
Oh I get what you mean now it is like a global effect effecting the whole video thats pretty cool I had never thought of doing that when i import vide or animations i import elements never even gave a second thought to applying effects in flash as I usually apply the effects in video editing software.

Just out of curiosity though if you are writing scripts like that then you must be pretty good at flash so why not make your whole site in flash or is that just code from a web page copied and pasted.
 
No the code is from the fla file in that splash page. I have my email open so I know who's replying to this topic and I can respond quickly. I've thought about that Hoogle, doing the whole website in Flash thing. But there are several reasons why I didn't. The most outstanding reason is that Flash and SEO do not get along. Google's search engine, so far as I know, is the only one that can index Flash content. And it's ability in this respect is scarce anyway. Number 2 reason is that mobile devices are on the rise for website viewing. I think we all know of the war between Adobe's Flash and Apple's iOS for its mobile devices. Number three, I'm really not all that great with scripting. This is my own fault too because I can never just sit and learn one thing at a time. I always have to have 3 things going on. In the future though, I may add a section to my site for Flash websites. Of course they won't be real-world websites but more like the ones on my Web Design page. It's all just templates that I put together.
 
I disagree to some point on your reasons

even with flash you still need an index page so have all your meta tags in the head section cleverly name your flash files and still upload your image folder with all your images in named appropriately so they act as tags, all though you are not using them on your page they are still hosted in your directory.

Or better still you can still have a html, xhtml, html5 php etc etc site but have more flash elements embedded these are very good for what we like to call SEO WHORES lol as embedded flash has a lot of meta data the more flash you have the more meta data you get which ultimately is what spiders look out for.


Ok I understand your device argument but I have done sites where they are in a number of formats all on the same domain with my landing page auto detecting the device it is being viewed on even from browser to browser, android to iphone pc to mac or even now tablet optimisation so it will load the best site for your device. ok admittedly this is a lot more work to make sites for all devices but simple few lines of code then you can make sure your viewer has the best viewing experience.

But yes if your actionscript is not upto par then you are better of maybe sticking to flash elements rather than sites. especially if you use iframes a lot for embedding in other sites etc.

But I was just wondering thats all good work keep it up
 
Hi Chris, I made a screenshot of what I am referring to just in case I wasn't clear. I'm a fan of padding and indentation. I think the black box is too close to the top border and the text sits right on the left border and makes the eye wander way over to the edge of the screen and I don't think that is effective design. I'd be interested in whether someone disagrees with that, since it is after all, my opinion.

crd.PNG
 
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