Thoughts on Digital Life

Here we go, the final installment of my summer blogs. I started 5 weeks ago blogging about colors, moving into typography, shapes, pictures and finally here we are at motion. Motion Webdesign has changed a lot since I started almost 20 years ago. In the very beginning we had frames, then we moved to Shockwave, making our way from Flash to HTML5 with CSS. It has become this responsive thing as well. Actually I feel it has matured. Looking at my design studies I am now using more knowledge from design as I did before. Since Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash motion has really become a part of webdesign. During these Flash days anything was okay. We didn't care about the filesize, loading times and all that kind of stuff. It had to look amazing. Actually now, we're there again - yet more matured. No longer do we animate for the sake of animating, we can now have it help our visitors. Guiding through the website Both small and big animations help guide a visitor throug...

Part 4 of my summer blogs on visual design: pictures. Pictures to me are photographs, but also infographics, video and such. Because photography is the biggest thing related to pictures, my focus will mainly be the photography. Emotion A photograph captures emotion. Many of the pictures we know well capture an emotion. During my research the picture below appeared to be the most famous photo. I always thought it would be the lunchtime on a skyscraper (Charles C. Ebbets, 1932) or the napalm attack (Nick Ut, 1972) - but it appears to be this picture of an Afghan girl by Steve McCurry taken in 1985. Before you read below the image, picture an emotion with this photo and then read on to find out if it was captured as you felt it was. This is Sharbat Gula, 13 years old at the time of the picture. Her parents had died in the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan and she was living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Doesn't matter if you got it right or not - you can most certainly...

This is the third part of my summer blogs on Visual (Web)Design. After looking at colors and fonts we're diving into shapes. What are shapes? When I'm talking about shapes I'm actually talking about a lot of things. Most notably I try to look at the branding. A visual guideline for a brand often has some characteristics. When I look at Apple for instance, the design is clean and simple. The logo itself doesn't have a sharp corner on it. So I would define Apple as a soft, subtle, clear brand. If you were to add sharp corners in an Apple design it would look a bit odd. The image above shows a hard shape and a soft shape. I generally look for these type of constants in a brand. If a brand is soft, the buttons will be rounded, I'll use lighter colors and such. If a brand is made up of sharp corners, I will adjust my design to match. Logo's Another part of shapes is the logo. A logo is usually a shape and some text. The stronger the shape of the logo...