A few resources that are mentioned:

• Firefox Extensions (including Firebug)
• jQuery
• Slide Examples
• MegaMan Sprite Animation

Note: this is an updated talk on the workshop I led two years ago

This one, however, changed daily for 9 days. Here’s the sequence:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

Sunday:

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday (The flames flickered ever so slightly):

Friday – Monday:

Now, once I finished that final graphic Dan approached me and made a funny request. He wanted a special little violent ending for himself. The thought of a custom final header for a few sketchy people sounded fun…so I obliged with this header that showed for a mere 5 people on campus:

In addition to the internal alteration of the header, I did another alteration on the login page for the Tuesday and Wednesday before as well as the Thursday of Thanksgiving. My pal, the turkey, showed up in place of the random image. Here he is:

Overall, the header was well received be the campus feuling my desire to come up with something nifty for the coming holidays! A special thanks to Ken, Zach, and Dan for giving good content suggestions and allowing me to bounce ideas off them!

| View | Upload your own

A few resources that were mentioned:

• Firefox Extensions (including Firebug)
• jQuery
• Slide Examples
• MegaMan Sprite Animation

Using some snazzy CSS easter-egg functionality combined with some PHP, we can dynamically alter the look of the portal and target customizations to the entire campus, groups of people, or individuals. On Halloween, we customized and targeted the entirety of our user population with the following header theme. We changed this:

To this:

The Halloween theme was a surprise to the campus and received a number of good reviews and comments! The theme didn’t reduce the portal’s functionality, it simply gave it a nice candy coating to add a little flair. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the layout (which is actually made up of 7 images). Due to the excitement around the Halloween theme, the campus can be sure that more are coming!

As I mentioned before, targeting the entire campus is doable along with targeting groups of people and individuals. Needless to say the targeting capabilities of this can be exploited by…well…by me. And I’ve had some fun exploiting it, too! Here’s a couple of fun ones that I targeted at specific users:

This header was targeted at my manager, Ken:

This one is targeted at Dee:

Here’s one that I targeted at Dan and Zach:

Fun times. So far, Dan, Zach, and I have some pretty sexy ideas for what can be done…ranging from minor tweaks to the logo (similar to the goofy ones I did above), to fully customized headers (like the Halloween one), all the way to full blown themes that customize a larger portion of myPlymouth. I look forward to getting creative with what I can draw and implement.

Topics:

• My Background
• My Project Background
• Application Design Process
  • Analysis
  • Language Selection
  • Database Design
  • Interface Design
  • Development
  • The Sweet Stuff
• Industry
  • Where it was
  • Where it is
  • Where its going
• Stuff I’ve Learned
• Suggestions

I must say that Team Fluffy Bunny rocked the house until both teams were merged into one as more players joined in. A total of 19 games were played in 7 hours. I ended up sucking majorly halfway through the day getting no more than 2 kills a game (and often 0!).

Of all the players, though, Cliff shined through as the 1337 pwnz0r making all the n00bs cry in pain with his mad paintball skills. The rest of us did well (kill counts coming soon, perhaps), although Al, Ted, and Erich tended to last the longest in the later games…jerks.

We worked together, we killed together, and we died together…heck, there was a bit of team-killing going on to help us along with the dying part :) All in all, the day was a blast! We’re hoping for more numbers the next go-round…if you haven’t tried the sport, give it a go. Its an adrenaline rush…and; you get to rain paint down on your friends until they beg for mercy. What more could you ask for?

Luckily my wife was there to document some of the games with her spiffy new camera. Check out the gallery here. Here’s a few sweet samples:

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html)
Jakob Nielson is a Web Usability guru (despite the fact that his site is so ugly). Check out the above linked article as well as the other Top Ten Lists at the bottom.

Web Design From Scratch (http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/basics.cfm)

• This site is great as it details the process of design and the differences between sites that have focused on art and those that have focused on providing tools. There are a lot of sections (see the links on the right hand side of the page) that are all interesting.
• Of particular not for this assignment:
  • “How people use web pages”
  • “Other online factors”
  • “The Design Spectrum”

Web Style Guide (http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/pages/editorial_style.html)

• The whole thing is a good read, but if you don’t want to read everything, Read Chapters 2 and 4 (they are short)

Here is what you need to provide for each site you choose to critique:

• Provide the Web Address to the site.
• Answer these questions: Why did you select the site? What interested you about this particular site?
• Describe features of the site, including the following:
  • Overall theme or main subject for the website
  • Types of materials presented on the website (e.g. letters, diaries, photographs, illustrations, historical summaries, literature texts)
• Answer these questions:
  • Is the information source trustworthy? How do you know?
  • Who is the website designed for? For example, is it intended to reach the general public, medical professionals, kids, older people, etc.? How do you know?
  • Is the website well-designed to reach that group of people? Why do you think so? Give specific examples (ie., vocabulary, ease of finding information, working hyperlinks, low-tech vs. high-tech video presentation [which is important if you’re calling in on a slow modem!!], visual ‘style,’ etc.)
  • Is the website easy to navigate? Why or why not?
  • Does the site design used by the site match well with the theme/subject and topics covered? (For instance, are the main buttons set up to correspond to key topics? Do the main sections of the website, as organized and presented, work together logically? If there are photographs, illustrations or graphics, do they complement/reinforce the theme effectively?)
• Describe and critique other design elements of the website.
  • Is the visual display plan effective? (e.g., Is the site too cluttered/busy? Is there too much empty space?)
  • Are the font sizes and designs appropriate (e.g., attractive, easy to read)?
  • Does the website make effective use of color and spacing?
• What can be improved, if anything?

Score sheet

The Scenario:
You are a scientist that studies chimpanzees. Last month you witnessed one or more chimpanzees do something that has never been done before. You were tasked with creating an application that details various aspects of that discovery…for some reason you chose Powerpoint as your tool.

Minimum Requirements:

• Your application must make use of various forms of media. (text, images, etc) – 20pts
• Your application must include at least 12 slides PLUS an additional notes slide that lists/describes the types of navigation used. – 20pts
• Your application must utilize (at minimum) conceptual/modal navigation and hypertext. Other forms of navigation can be used as appropriate. – 25pts
• Your application must not navigate as normal powerpoint slides navigate (i.e. advance on click). To get a starting point, read the instructions below. – 25pts
• Use proper spelling and grammar. – 10pts
• Be creative and have fun with the assignment! – Priceless

Setting Up Your Powerpoint Application For This Assignment:

• With your powerpoint application open, click on Slide Show > Set Up Show….
• In the Show options section, check the box: Loop continuously until ‘Esc’
• In the Show slides section, check the From radio button and choose the start/end slides as appropriate to your application. (If your first slide is your contents where you begin all your navigation, then you’ll want the start/end boxes to be set to 1 and 1). Experiment.
• …this is just a starting point. Explore the application and make it bend to your will.

Here’s a good reference for advanced PowerPoint stuff.

Handing in your Lab:
The lab is due next Friday at midnight. To hand it in:

• log in to myPlymouth
• click on the myCourses tab
• click on the Multimedia course
• go into the Assignments section
• click on Lab 1
• Browse to your powerpoint file in the form
• Submit it

Reminder: We have lab on Thursday, so we meet in Memorial. I will be posting the lab assignment on this blog before lab.