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...