Posts Filed Under Art

Desktoptopia is really cool: it’s a desktop wallpaper changer, but the wallpapers are downloaded directly from Desktoptopia’s collection of selected designer wallpapers. Most of the one’s I’ve seen so far are really nice. This was originally available only for Mac OS X, but the team recently released a beta version for Window’s. It’s dead simple to use and definitely worth a look if you’re constantly looking for decent wallpapers.

Because you should be. Reading and commenting.

Want to see one of my digital art pieces in person? Check out The Human User Fusion Exhibit at the Studio Arts Center in South Bend, IN. I’m not sure how long the exhibition will be up, but the opening reception is Thursday, January 24th 7-9pm. Or you could be really lazy and wait for me to post the piece on deviantArt after the exhibition.

SHOUT IT OUT by *liliy on deviantART

This is a pretty funny list, and though I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere around the web I couldn’t help but share today. Others may qualify, but I’m sure these things apply to me:

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.

6. You consider meals interruptions.

7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.

11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.

14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.

16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best.

21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.

24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.

Fall is, perhaps, the greatest of seasons, lacking both the extreme heat of summer and the extreme cold of winter, and being just a lot more interesting than spring. In a recent chat with Liliy we discussed our love of Fall, and she mentioned the concept of eternal fall–a neverending wonderland of cool weather and beautiful trees. I was inspired to create some wallpapers, which I share with you now (and go visit my DeviantArt gallery):

Eternal Fall - Elegant by ~LunarZero on deviantART

Eternal Fall - Spooky by ~LunarZero on deviantART

It’s been difficult keeping up with the news for the past couple days. Things have been busier than usualy lately, what with the site redesigns and the last days at the Chalet and the getting things ready for one more year of school. And the Death Note. Can’t forget the Death Note. I’ll save that for another post.

One thing I’d skimmed over earlier caught my again tonight, however, and I had to share:

That’s really awesome, and the mind behind it was apparently snatched up by Adobe. Here’s hoping future releases of Photoshop feature this.

It only took about nine months, but I’ve finally updated my deviantART account. I hadn’t planned to let it sit for so long, but… there was a lot going on last semester.

Speaking of which: having survived four foundation classes in a single semester (with straight A’s, hah!), some advice for future Western Michigan University art students. Do not do it. You’ll hate yourself for it. It’s great if you can pull it off, but if you don’t have to, don’t. The advisor’s aren’t lying about how much work it is.

Having said that, last semester was one of my best. Yeah, I was on edge constantly, between the stress and the lack of sleep and everything else, but I really enjoyed the art classes. It was a welcome change from the mind-numbing business courses and the computer courses where I already know everything they’re talking about. If there’s anyway I can pull it, I’ll get a graphic design major sometime in the future.

Well, that’s not completely true. Actually, I despise them, with every ounce of hate and loathing I can muster and then some. They’re horrendous: it’s as if they say “You know, this Internet thing might catch on someday, and when it does, we’d like to be at the forefront. But until then, just throw up whatever comes to mind and we’ll sort it out later. Don’t worry about how it looks, whether it’s fully accessible by everyone, or even whether it’s usable; we’ll get to that stuff when this whole Internet thing really starts to pick up.”

It’s just totally unbelievalbe, and it drives me mad everytime I try to peruse through one.

(For those of you paying attention, I’ve gone over this before. Thanks to the MySQL crash, though, you can’t view my previous post on this subject. If you’re still interested, read on…)

Let’s use the local 3C’s site as an extremely-fitting example. Here’s a quick list of things that are simply wrong with this site I can pick out from a quick overview of the site:

• Splash Page: I don’t care what anyone says–more than 99% of the time (and absolutely in this case) splash pages serve no purpose that any other, more feature-and-information-full page could.
• No Structure: Those categories on the right look nice, until you actually start surfing. The site has no definitive structure, the only unifying links being those accross the top. And even those are often in two seperate places on the same page, often with differing names, for no apparent reason.
• Overflow: Once you get past the splash page, nearly every other page has navigation shifted to the left. I use the term navigation loosely here, as more often than not, their are so many links (arbitrarily sorted by alphabetical order) as to make the list nearly useless. Some entries are even duplicated, in the same list, on the same page, for no reason.
• Hidden Navigation: This is, admittedly, more personal preference. Still, hiding navigation links in a drop-down menu has never made sense to me–it might have made sense back when people were using 640×480 resolutions and screen space was at an absolute premium, but this is the 21st century. Most people I know are surfing at at least 1024×768, and even 800×600 is large enough for nearly any design.

To be fair, the local 3C’s site is extremely bad. That’s not saying much, though. Among other things, I’ve seen: a college site that took nearly ten minutes to fully load, a site using pop-up navigation in such a way that it was only Internet Explorer compatible and absolutely required for viewing the site, and a number of other things that just don’t make any sense. I mean, nearlly all other professional websites don’t have these problems, and certainly not at the same level as college websites when they do.

What’s wrong with colleges? It already costs an arm and a leg to go; don’t you think they’d want a killer website to bleed those last few pennies out of everyone that came across it? They practially burry the information your looking for in an endless sea of confusing navigation and useless images, and then, when you finally think you’ve made it somewhere, the information is either: unavailable (your using the wrong web browser, have javascript turned off, etc.) or horribly outdated.

I’m sick of it. I was told who to talk to today about getting a job at the local 3C working on their website, and I’d love to get the chance. I’d make an example out of it: how to make a usable, attractive website accessible to nearly everyone. Something that actually made people want to visit the college website.

Update: Whilst digging through the pages on the local 3C’s site, I came across their Web Publishing Guidelines. I was at first shocked that they had any, and after looking through, I’m still not very impressed. It does, however, answer a few questions.

The left-side bar is, apparently, a list of related links and is not meant as any sort of internal navigation. Imagine how they could have cleared some of my ranting up by just slapping the words “Related Links” at the top of the list? It still doesn’t excuse the slipshod fashion in which the links are arranged, nor the usually overwhelming number of them.

Since the left-side bar is not meant for navigation, that only leaves the drop-down menu, which takes me back to my fourth point: why on earth, for all that is sacred, would anyone think that hiding the primary navigation links in a drop-down menu is a good thing?

Anyways, I now seriously doubt that they would be open to any sort of site redesign. Any changes from the “look and feel” (using the term loosely) of the site has to be approved by marketing. I’d still like to work on it, though. I might be able to do something to help it.

Update: I just found a Website Experience Survey on the site, the link for which is inexplicably located at the bottom of the “related links” list, which I doubt most people ever make it through. I filled it out, expressing some of my complaints (as the form allowed), hopefully in a more–ahem–congenial manner. I doubt it will change anything, but it’s nice to at least get the fealing that I’m complaining to the college and not just myself.