Hey Rocky, watch us put new graphics on our website!

Rocky: Again, that trick nev­er works.
Us: This time for sure.
As my reg­u­lar read­ers might have noticed we have once again tweaked the design, with a sub­tle back­ground image and a new logo in the top left cor­ner. We have also start­ed using Site Meter to mon­i­tor web traf­fic (the lit­tle rain­bow box under the side bar.
We will prob­a­bly nev­er be 100% sat­is­fied with the page design, most­ly due to cur­rent lim­its of HTML. Maybe when we can have the lev­el of con­trol of the user expe­ri­ence as we once did in the print medi­um we will be hap­py… until then we’ll just have to make do.

6 thoughts on “Hey Rocky, watch us put new graphics on our website!”

  1. I’ve seen quite amaz­ing designs done in HTML. Not to be rude, but there are many far in advance of the tech­nique dis­played on your page. Per­haps what you want are eas­i­er tools?
    On the print side, con­sid­er that mon­i­tors have quite poor lev­el of dots per inch. Your aver­age mon­i­tor does­n’t even make it to 100. If a print­er was that poor, you’d have it put down.

  2. Yeah, I agree with you. My lit­tle site isn’t exact­ly push­ing the enve­lope design wise. But as its just a lit­tle bit of fun I don’t real­ly care all that much. It works for the most part.
    The thing the both­eres me more is that regard­less of what I do I can not gar­entee that the way I see my site is the way you see it. For exam­ple, I’ve been using PNG graph­ics cause I like the alpha trans­paren­cy, but I know that at least on vis­i­tor to the site uses a brows­er inca­pable of view­ing PNG. I could includ­ed JPEG ver­sions of the same images and stuff but I hate the idea that I should have to do all the work. In print if I includ­ed a graph­ic, print it and give you the print­ed doc you see the page as I it was when I hand­ed it to you.
    And yes, the res­o­lu­tion of com­put­er mon­i­tors leaves a lot to be desired, I’ve been bitch­ing about that for years. The whole bit-map men­tal­i­ty is at fault and a throw back that’s almost as old as the Y2K bug.
    I could move the whole page to a flash based pre­sen­ta­tion and gain greater con­trol of the user expe­ri­ence, but there is still the prob­lem of the user need­ing to be able to dis­play flash, dif­fer­ent gam­ma set­tings of dif­fer­ent mon­i­tors, dif­fer­ent lev­els of col­or and dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing speeds, all hav­ing a sig­nif­i­cant impact of the final dis­play.
    Oh, and I’m not offend­ed. My site does what I have built it to do. It was after all an exper­i­ment in CCS orig­i­nal­ly.

  3. Care­ful, the bitmap thing is a seper­ate issue from the dpi thing. The for­mer is soft­ware, the lat­ter is hard­ware.
    A lot of peo­ple have “dif­fer­ent­ly abled” eyes, so they’d see your stuff dif­fer­ent even in print. The web is fan­tas­tic at decon­struct­ing the assump­tions of print. It’s best to just get stuff out there that meets your sin­gu­lar vision and let oth­er peo­ple deal with the mess.
    There are peo­ple who care that their work looks the same to them on all plat­forms known to god, but they quick­ly stop pro­duc­ing much worth­while.

  4. ’ ”Dif­fer­ent­ly abled” eyes’??? Inter­est­ing con­cept, but I’m not sure I under­stand what you mean.

  5. Well, some peo­ple are col­or blind (and there’s like 4 or 5 kinds of col­or blind­ness), some peo­ple have myopia (as I do), or asytig­ma­tism, or synaes­the­sia, or all kinds of things. When I say “some” I mean “many”.
    Then peo­ple browse dif­fer­ent­ly. Some might use voice browsers. My brows­er has the abil­i­ty to turn off all styling — and I do if the style is too aggres­sive. Some peo­ple use braille browsers.
    It’s sure nice to have a good look­ing site, but it’s best to relax about these things. I hear the next world’s per­fect, so we can just wait for that.

  6. Ah, that’s what I thought you meant, kewl. And not to fear, if I was tru­ely con­cerned about such issues then this site as it is would nev­er have been made pub­lic.

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