Coding for Hollers
All right. The friend's site that I've been working on in bits and pieces for the last five months or so is now done - or at least as done as my current Flash skill-set will take it. There are a few tweaks I'm likely to make in a few months, after I've shored up the miniscule (read: zero) amount of Action Script I know. For now, it works, and it looks pretty good to me.
I invite you to take a look - not for my work, but for the work of the artist whose site it is - Kate Ten Eyck. I've always been a little in awe of her work, as one of the few artists I know who manages to find that sweet spot between soul and technique.
Thanks especially go out to Greg Gritmon, who did his level best to give me all the tech help he could. I learned more from him about Flash in a few brief phone calls and emails than I did in the last three years of working on it. Well, the phone calls and emails were brief to me. I'm sure he found them interminable, but what're you gonna do?
Note: if you do happen to stumble across something that doesn't look quite right, please let me know - don't forget computer/platform/browser info. I don't expect this thing will work on a Pentium 386 running AOL on Windows 98. Nor (being Flash) will it work on your iPhone. But the rest of the world should see nice things.
D.
I invite you to take a look - not for my work, but for the work of the artist whose site it is - Kate Ten Eyck. I've always been a little in awe of her work, as one of the few artists I know who manages to find that sweet spot between soul and technique.
Thanks especially go out to Greg Gritmon, who did his level best to give me all the tech help he could. I learned more from him about Flash in a few brief phone calls and emails than I did in the last three years of working on it. Well, the phone calls and emails were brief to me. I'm sure he found them interminable, but what're you gonna do?
Note: if you do happen to stumble across something that doesn't look quite right, please let me know - don't forget computer/platform/browser info. I don't expect this thing will work on a Pentium 386 running AOL on Windows 98. Nor (being Flash) will it work on your iPhone. But the rest of the world should see nice things.
D.
posted by Dave Kopperman | 1:35 AM
4 Comments:
I like the site, but I think I told you that when you showed me the work in progress.
I think the file sizes are kind of large. It takes a long time to load the splash page/background.
I have a FIOS connection to the Internet and a new computer (iMac; couple weeks old) and it still took about 15 to 25 seconds for the page to load. I watched watched it slowly draw itself down the page.
I agree, and it's one of the things I'm going to tackle for the next round. The background is the big question: it's the same for the entire site, so I'd like to keep it as large as possible. But it's only 1.7 MB, so it really shouldn't be taking as long as it is to load in. I'll bet there's some sort of loading order protocol I need to set up.
I should put a background color in so that the image time doesn't seem as obvious in the meantime...
D.
Nice work! I really like the design of the site, it's beautiful.
Some functionality comments:
1) Please don't put sound on a site without a "Sound Off" button.
2) The sound also doesn't continue for long, so I'm not sure why it's there... did she require it?
3) Is there any way to fit the "Artist's Statement" on one page?
4) The "select press coverage" should really link to said coverage. If you can't link to it then include excerpts from what the sources said about her. Right now there's no real point to the section.
5) The prints took a while to load, and the drawings and sculptures each wouldn't load for me until I had hit the link twice (this is from the bottom of the subpages within the "works" category, not from the "works" frontpage). Once the subsections load they work fine.
6) I really like the way the video section works. It's very user-friendly, informative, functional, etc. - I like that you can read about the piece before watching it, and it's great that there are links to high-res and to YouTube. It's nice and clean that you don't see the controls at the bottom unless you choose to by rolling over that area. Good player.
Thanks:
1,2) Actually, up until this morning, there was a sound off button. The sound originally did loop, but she had an issue with the fact that it continued behind the sculptures, which have sounds of their own. When I removed the looping (a half-assed solution, but a solution nonetheless), I decided to take out the sound off button. I guess I'll put it back.
At some point when my Action Scripting gets tighter, I plan to revisit the site and fix a couple of small things specifically related to these issues which you note.
3) Probably not.
4) I know it should, and I've asked her. I'll remind her.
5) I still have some scripting issues with load times. I'm not 100% yet sure how to solve those, but it's on my list of things to do.
6) Yes, I really like that Flash component player, which is why I busted so much ass to get it to work properly, rather than just embed a YouTube or Vimeo link, or even put a QT player.
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