Cool websites

It took me a while to find a great website. Second Story had some well-designed sites that I really liked, but none of them really had anything to do with architecture. I loved the Lewis and Clark site, but it had nothing to do with architecture. But I liked the way it was organized into three parts, which I see my site in three parts; history, preservation efforts, and photo gallery. It had sounds, interactive maps, exhibit gallery, video clips of Native Americans, and it presented the story from multiple view points. All of these were great features.

There was one site on css Zen Garden called Urban that came closer to something I could envision. I like how it used architectural features for the border on the left that served as the navigation bar, and it had a picture of buildings as the footer to the page. I could do something similar to this and get a real look and feel for an architectural district.

Another site I came across which I also could emmulate, PBS's site for a Ken Burns film about Frank Lloyd Wright. This website used Frank Lloyd Wright architectural features as the overall background for the pages (the wrapper) and then each subsection had a different background color and some kind of Wright-styled architecutral feature on the left. Although each sebsection was a different color, all the colors worked with FLW styling, and the architectural images on the left kept all the sections together. It has a nice introduction page with an image that draws you in. There's a well-designed menu on the bottom of the page that keeps with the theme in design, although it's a wierd place for a menu to be. Of all the websites I visited, this is probably the best example that I've seen so far of something I would want to emulate that would be within the realm of possibilities for me to create. It's not so far advanced in design like most of the Second Story or Terra Incognita sites that I wouldn't feel overwhelmed trying to do something like this.

Image Assingment pt2

I fed this thing through the validator and finally got it validated. I didn't realize that in order to get validated, I had to change my br/ codes. And I forgot my alt tags. Very important for acccessibility! My page is not the most beautiful, but it's functional. As I get more comfortable w/ html & css, things are becoming easier and slowly looking better.

The next assignment will prove to be more difficult. How can I represent historic preservation in Richmond through a website? I would like for my navigation and header to have architectural elements in them, but how I go about writing this into my design is beyond me at this point. Much trial and error will begin...

Image Assignment

The unexpectedly hard part of this assignment was to find suitable photos. I wanted the find some architectural photos that could be used in my final project, but nothing was suitable. So I settled for a cool photo of some railworkers. Photoshop is an amazing program, if a bit overwhelming at times. I've been using this program for 3 years in my work, but I still don't know 1/10th of it capabilities. My assignment is posted at:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeohrc6/hist697/image.htm

Photoshop

This book is great, if a little overwhleming. As I said in a previous blog, I've done a lot of work with photoshop, but never anything like this. 3/4 of the tools I've never used and while some of the things I understand what they are, like layers, some of the other things went over my head.

I do have to wonder however, when is an image edited to the point that it becomes bad history? Are we ethical in manipulating these images and presenting them as history? As suppose as long as one states that the image was enhanced/manipulated in photoshop, then it probably would be ethical. Of course, one could argue that some of the manipulations, such as repairing the man & cat photo like we did in class last week, actually enhances the photo historically. The photo was damaged by the ravages of time, and it was simply repaired to an appearance that was probably more like how it appeared when it was first shot. I guess the bottom line is, if I alter an historical photo in anyway through photoshop or whatever, I need to make that clear on my website or I would be doing bad history.

Tufte

This book was beautifully illustrated, so I can see why is cost over $40. But his analysis of chart usage, particularly his case w/ regards to the Challenger explosion is flawless. I might be at a slight advantage to some of the humanists in our class in that I double majored in Sociology which required me to take a statistics class where we used SPSS and learned about presenting and interpreting information visually. I totally agree with Tufte in that charts and graphs have to be carefully constructed to get the proper information across to a user.
Also, graphic data and statistics are very powerful tools. Many laypeople take these things very seriously and believe that statistical data and charts are a more "truthful" way to present research. I think the average person does not really understand statistics and charts, and is willing to assume the chart maker knows more than they do. Prime example are the brilliant history grad students at GMU, many of whom will readily admit they do not understand how to visually present data.
Anyway, very useful book.

wicked worn look

I'm still on the search for that perfect font that says "Jackson Ward Historic District." The wicked worn look had some great links to free fonts; and free being the optimal word here, as I am poor. What says late 19th-century Romanesque and post-bellum architecture? Or what says African American neighborhood? So far, I have yet to find anything I like.

Also on the wicked worn look, the link to Sleeping Giants. This website is very cool! They've captured the feel of a delapidated airfield with the music and graphics of the site. The movies are well done, I'm sure Mary & the rest of the class that was in the documentary class can appreciate the clips. I appreciated the how-tos on the other postings from wicked worn look site as well, these may come in handy.

I've found some great Habs/Haer photos from Jackson Ward that I'll be using in my final project (ah, the beauty of public domain). It'll be fun to experiment with these in photoshop. I've used photoshop at work to process the National Register of Historic Places scanned images of nominations on the register, but no retouching was involved as we wanted to get as faithful a fascimile of the original as we could. But I'm very familiar w/ cropping, adjusting levels, and all the different file formats. I'm looking forward to having fun w/ Photoshop.