kcDigitalArts

I showed Perch to year 3 students a couple of weeks ago – it is a really cool bit of software

I’m just working on a personal site with it to really test it out but suffice to say it is REALLY clever

well via Twitter they have just announced a 20% discount with the the code MARCHHARE for (I assume) march only – this means £28 rather than £35 (+VAT) – I think it might be just the solution for lots of you

with a (little) bit of code you will be able to use it as a blog, a gallery, a website and more – it’s standards based, it’s from the UK, it has cool little animated birds, great video tutorials – what is there not to like?

go but it and use it for your PP module

if you haven’t seen it go have a look here and watch the video on the front page

http://grabaperch.com/

ps. check their forum – it is using bbPress, the forum counterpart to wordpress – you can integrate the two for single sign on as well

anyone interested in doing a simple website for a local charity?

no payment but may be good experience and portfolio

could be wordpress based even

let me know

mark

code for tables we use in the lesson today (friday 15th) is available here

tables code

despite the owls…..

make-your-mockup-in-markup

..how good was that exhibition!

The V & A curated a superb group of digital work. We must try to create/ make more installation ideas at college.

+ the looping short video clip wall for the degree show would be an excellent idea even if its not interactive!

Post your photo and video blog links from Decode in the comments.

new movie in folder 179 on where to find the features present in coda in dreamweaver and vice versa

it’s about similarities as much as differences and should help you work in both

remember – I’m teaching you code not software!!!

source files and realtime demo of me creating ( with no planning mistakes and all ) the DAM front page

30 minutes and 105Mb but hopefully it will help

folder 173

Following todays additional session with Alasdair from the LRC ( alasdair.macleod@kingston-college.ac.uk ), here are some of the extremely useful links:

KARTOO – visual map based search engine

VISUWORDS – online graphic dictionary & Thesaurus

ARTCYCLOPEDIA – as listed by the British Library as useful art research resource

and

THISISLIKE – associative knowledge network

plus remember to use search engines other than google i.e.

DOGPILE which uses several engine to find information

you now need to start assembling the content for your site – we will need this for next week and or before

make sure you have it with you in digital form

artists exhibiting can be very varied – from fine art to games to concept art etc

think about maps etc

look around and see what content is on other gallery sites

as you all went to frieze art – have a look at the sites of the galleries we saw there

the frieze art exhibitors list is here

now you know how the css layouts work in the background I’m finally prepared to show you how to cheat

online there are lots of templates available for free – lots of these are cheesey and overly complex and tricky to understand the way they work but it’s really good to have a set of basic frameworks where a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done, and in a correct and valid way that you can trust

i grab them from all over and tend to go looking when I need them however it may be useful to you to have a one stop shop of recommended templates to start with

everytime I go looking I end up somewhere different so feel free to add any other sources blow as comments but todays recommended source is at codesucks

here there are 57 fixed width semantically correct layouts for you – somewhere in here I expect you will find a layout that can serve as the basis for what you need for the digital art museum website

we will go over this in the session today

REMEMBER – I AM ABLE TO ANSWER EMAIL QUESTIONS AND OR RECORD MOVIES IN RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS EASILY – EMAIL ME AND IF I CAN I WILL BE ABLE TO ANSWER WITHIN A DAY OR SO – DON’T SUFFER IN SILENCE!!!!

this is just the most awesome news

the indie version of unity 2.6 (previously $199) we have 10 licenses in room 106 is now F R E E

the pro version is still $1500 but the indie version is what you need to get started and very fully featured – it recently went cross platform and is just an amazing piece of software and it works brilliantly with C4D – we will be having a quick look in year 1, we teach it in semester 2 and last year a number of students used it for their double projects

F A N T A S T I C news – the news of the year to be honest – grab a copy before they change their mind

UNITY: Game Development Tool

for some web demos (you ned to install the web plugin first) see this page

imagine you have been commissioned to produce a simple website for a small commercial gallery in kingston called dam – digital art museum

the central principle for the gallery is that it will display only work for which the digital element is significant

the gallery is a commercial organisation that needs to sell work to survive so prices are high

they sell prints of images, sculptural pieces and full installations

some of the work they exhibit is fine art some is very much commercial work, illustrations, stills and development work from games and movies etc

it is also acts as an agent for the artists/designers it represents, introducing and representing them with outside clients

it needs to strike a difficult balance between the commercial work that will pay the bills and the more interesting and niche interactive work that may be more difficult commercially

the address of the gallery is

55 richmond road
kingston upon thames
surrey
KT2 5BP

tel 0208 939 4609

make up an email address

you have been asked to look at producing a working prototype website and trusted as a professional to advise on what content is featured and how as long as it meets the commercial and artistic aims of the gallery

the only specification you MUST work within are that the site should be XHTML and CSS based, no Flash and must fully pass w3c validation

we’ll talk more about this in the session today – this is what I need you to look at during the reading week, the first week back we will have a crit about your concepts in my web session with you

you do not need to be doing ANY coding at this stage – just think about design and structure and content

find some examples – eg dam berlin

we looked at forms today in the lesson and I showed you two simple options

freedback.com – a hosted and very easy to use online form generator

and

forms to go – a shareware and more fully featured php based form generator available at bebosoft.com

both are excellent solutions but you will need to be able to strip the html produced apart in order to style it how you want

also look at folder 055 for a video tutorial – this uses freeway and then tacohtml but the process is the same

do you use hotmail?

read this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8291268.stm

great story – from daring fireball

WTF? Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes name after internet jokes – Telegraph