Web Site - Finished

I finished my website today and it is now posted on the web. The address is www.uleth.ca/~phillip.plourde, I think I am really pleased with it. All of the pages worked out exactly the way I wanted them to. I felt like some of the text was not as well planned as I wanted it to be but I can always go back and change it when I have more time. I really liked working with dreamweaver, it was not to hard to learn and once you got the hang of it you could work really fast.

Great Web Idea

Today as I was working on finding a theme for my website I decided that since I was a Bio major why not give my site a bio theme. As I thought about this more I started to think it would really work. Now I am just looking for more bio pics but some of my ideas include using DNA sequences, and lost of random SEM (kind of special electron microscope) images of different cellular structures. I think I will use the SEM and DNA images for the home page and maybe even a Bio luminescent plant for the intro page. For the rest of the pages I think I am going to use Bio images that relate to each topic. For example im going to use a image of two nerve cells making contact for my Contacts page and possibly people working in a lab for the experience page.

Web Site - Intro

We have now begun to discuss web site design. There was a couple of styles we discussed in class including Information Publishing, E-Commerce and Brochureware. My favorite style is the brochureware one and a good example of it can be found at: http://www.advertisingdesign.com/index2.html. The other styles were useful but I found the Information Publishing sites annoying mostly because they tried to present so much information that I would get lost in them and not be able to find anything or I would lose my place. At the end of class we took a look at the program Dreamweaver. It was simple enough to use and I also learned that you use photoshop a lot when doing web design which is something I never knew before.

Collage - Meaning

The first thing I wanted people to notice when they viewed my work was how much light it seemed to radiate. I really tried hard to give the work this sense of electricity and light brightly coursing through all visual aspects of the piece. The various points of bright light were incorporated to signify a accumulation of knowledge in the form of digital information. My choice of color was chosen not just for its visual appeal but because of the feeling it presents the viewer with. Various hues of blue have always been associated with cooler feelings, by using blues it gives the viewer this feeling of technological professionalism, and removes much of the personal element of the piece. This is what I wanted because computers and digital codes are rather impersonal entity's doing a specific job as commanded with no understanding of consequences. I hoped that the cooler colors would help the viewer see unique individuals with personality's as impersonal entity's almost computer like.

The Silhouetted individuals I created to show that we as a human race may be all unique and different in terms of race, religion, social status, and gender but yet there is something inherently common that flows thought each of us. I used the numbering forming the individuals as a way of showing that we are all in fact not as different as we would like to think and that we are all connected. The use of numbers can also be seen as a way that we all identify ourselves. All of us have our identity recorded as various combinations of numbers and quite often those number speak to who we are. I then superimposed the silhouettes against a image of the world in an effort to further show that we are all connected no matter were we live on this planet. Finally the circling digital numbers bring the whole piece together by creating the effect of a pipe or link, the idea is that we as individuals are defined by numbers and because of this can be connected thought digital links no matter were we are in the world. The bright central point of light represents the wealth of human knowledge and our potential, it is located at the end of what could be termed the data pipe and is therefore available to be accessed or added to no matter who you are or were you are in this world. With that my over all theme is that of connection no matter who we are or were we live.

Collage Is Finished

I finished my collage today and it was a lot of fun. I worked more on this one than I did on my first assignment and I feel that this activity really helped me to understand the different ability's of photoshop. For this project I had to use so many different filters to get the right effect and this process took a lot of time and trial and error. I think this is why I really felt like I learned a lot from this project because it required so much experimentation. The other problem I had that I had to work though was only having really low resolution stock images, my pic of the earth for instance was a horrible image and I had to basically retrace the whole image twice and then resize it to be able to get it to work.

Intense Editing

These two images illustrate some of the time consuming editing I am doing to create my collage. The bottom image is the original low resolution stock image that I used and above is the finished high resolution image I created from the stock image. It probably took around one and a half hours or more to increase the resolution of the stock image.