£5, Bargin!

Just a quick note for all the web designers to say that if you don't know about these books already then you should. I came across a few books by publishing company Taschen last year in Fopp, based around websites and how they were created [the books being called Web Design: Flash Sites, and Web Design: Portfolios].

I then found a few more yesterday in Zavvi [these being Web Design: Music Sites, and Web Design: Studios]. For a tiny £5 each for a hundred or so pages or sheer excellence in Web Design these books are amazing. Granted they are no tutorials, but with looks of pictures and quite a fair bit of information these are worth the money. Go grab one now!

New York, New York

After a short weekend away in the Big Apple I found something that may be of some interest to me in my final year. I was walking past The New York Times building on Broadway, if I'm correct, and noticed two walls filled these strange black boxes. I thought nothing of it as I knew I wouldn't be able to get in because of the security at the entrance. I turned a corner to find an entrance open to the public, perfect opportunity.


Two walls filled with about 400 6" screens. All connected to a computer. This was very weird at first sight. Each individual screen seemed to be displaying a different piece of information. Then at certain intervals, some would start and then stop making different patterns, but exactly the same on both walls. I read that the piece was called 'Moveable Type' by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin [2007] and said the following on the project




"Moveable Type is an active portrait of the New York Times that is fueled by the contents of the daily paper and to the visitors to NYTimes.com who are browsing, searching, reading and commenting. The artists have programmed the work to extract fragments - words, phrases, quotes, numbers and places - from The Times' growing, living, real-time news database, and to recombine these fragments into a series of ever changing kinetic compositions."

Interesting. Just a little bit.

Research

You know when you set out to do something but then get completely sidetracked by something, well, unfortunately I'm doing this a lot recently, I'm still debating whether this is a good or a bad thing.

So, I was searching for a nice pair of trainers, the winter weather has taken its toll on my converse, and I went to a popular American shoe company to browse their online catalogue and became engrossed in their website.



http://www.macbethfootwear.com

This site is built entirely in flash and has various sections which move or can be moved and have quirky actions when you hover over them. The site is very appealing and I think that if I didn't know about the shoe company I would still be interested because of the design of the site. Also, they seem to have used RSS feeds within the site which made me think of a problem I was having last year, which I would like to rectify. Oh the joys of the internet.