Babble v1 198

babble-digest Thursday, February 12 1998 Volume 01 : Number 198

In this issue:
ugly borders within clientside clickmaps
Thanks
working with fonts
racist remarks and your quiet admin
Re: Helvetica wanted
Introduce Myself?
Re: Here's a question.
Re: Site critique
Inspiration & Theft
linked portfolios
Re: Plumb design
RE: Here's a question.
Re: Here's a question.
TECH/HTML DHTML webzine
Pet Peeve about Dreamweaver
Explorer scripting ?!?
Re: Site critique
Re: babble-digest V1 #197

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 11:14:03 +0100
From: Raoul Cannemeijer <Raoul.Cannemeijer@fantastic.ch>
Subject: ugly borders within clientside clickmaps

Hello all,

When a clientside image map is generated, it creates the outline of the
click area after clicking on your preferred option.
It is very ugly with a navigation image that stays permanent on the
page, for example in a bottom frame.
Design wise it is a complete disaster!

Is there a way to turn this off?

Best regards,

Raoul Cannemeijer

The Fantastic CorporationTM
- - first in broadband multimedia -

Bahnhofstrasse 12
P.O. Box 1350
CH-6301 Zug, Switzerland
Tel. +41-41-728 88 83
Fax +41-41-728 88 12
Raoul.cannemeijer@fantastic.ch
www.fantastic.ch

Zug - New York - London - Singapore - Lugano

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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 13:55:25 +0200
From: Hanan Cohen <hananc@bashan.co.il>
Subject: Thanks

I would like to thank all of you for your support, either by mail or by
thought.

Remember, Peace is never off-topic.

- ---
Hanan Cohen
Bashan Systems - Jerusalem

***Love and Peace***
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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:33:39 +0200
From: hennerich@superonline.com (Karl Heinz Kluter)
Subject: working with fonts

Good morning Babble fellows

with the ALIEN EYE CANDY Plugin
I found a very nice tool
to bring 3-D outlook to typefaces

Did anyone of you came across
to similar tools /plugins?

For your kind help in this matter
I send you
Sunshine from the Aegean coast of Turkey
Karlheinz Klüter
http://www.jazzpages.com/KarlheinzKlueter
http://www.bodrum-info.org/
The good thing with digital medias is;
you can change everything so quickly!
________________________________
The bad thing with digital medias is;
you can change everything so quickly!

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 98 07:42:27 -0500
From: Kevin Travers <kwt@highfive.com>
Subject: racist remarks and your quiet admin

Hi Babbaliers,

Just wanted to let everyone know that Mr. Shelley was removed from the
list about two minutes after his little commentary two days ago. I also
privately emailed everyone involved. This type of attitude is obviously
not tolerated and will cause removal without warning. I hate that to
sound like a threat, I just want everyone to know that I read every
single post and care about the quality of the list and I react more
frequently than you think, both good and bad! :)

I had hoped to quiet this without a lot of discussion about it, but
people have expressed some concerns so I am just letting everyone know
that the problem is gone and we can continue on with the babble!

thanks to everyone who expressed their concern.

Kevin Travers
H I G H F I V E
http://www.highfive.com
kevin@highfive.com

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 98 08:17:41 -0500
From: Kevin Travers <kwt@highfive.com>
Subject: Re: Helvetica wanted

another good book on typography ...

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
by Erik Spiekermann, E.M. Ginger

comment from the High Five Bookstore (shameless plug)
http://www.highfive.com/core/bookstore.html

"An entertaining, informative and educational introduction to
type. Explains
in every-day terms what type is, how to select it, and how to
use it to improve
communication. Includes over 200 illustrations and photographs."

there are a few more there as well.

>Study some books on typography and get to
>learn your fonts and their characteristics. I recommend 'The Elements of
>Typographic Style' by Robert Bringhurst for any designer interested in
>typography ... (which should be everyone).
>
>Caleb Fuller
>analog creations | the web is our voice
>email@calebfuller.com

Kevin Travers
H I G H F I V E
http://www.highfive.com
kevin@highfive.com

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 08:43:56 -0500
From: "Aimee Lingman" <aimeel@mail.sundialnw.com>
Subject: Introduce Myself?

Hello, Babble folks,

I am new to this list, so I thought that since I will be participating
quite frequently, I should introduce myself. I am a Canadian web developer
who is currently looking to relocate to New York or CA. I specialize in
creative entertaining web design, and I've found that the market just
doesn't exist in a small northern community.

Well, other than that, I'm young, intelligent, and ever so slightly
sarcastic. And I'm really looking forward to some great design
discussions.

Have a great day everyone!
- -Aim

Aimee Lingman
S u n d i a l
www.sundialnw.com
Home of Valentino: a different kind of cupid.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:34:54 -0500
From: "Aimee Lingman" <aimeel@mail.sundialnw.com>
Subject: Re: Here's a question.

I think it could be that web site developers do not want to risk losing the
visitor to the other sites, or possibly they want to ensure that the
visitor see what they want them to see. This way, they can control the
experience of their visitor.

- -Aim

Aimee Lingman
S u n d i a l
www.sundialnw.com
Home of Valentino: a different kind of cupid.

- ----------
> From: Antony Richards <antony@mcmann-tate.com.au>
> To: babble@highfive.com
> Subject: Here's a question.
> Date: Thursday, February 12, 1998 12:53 AM
>
> Q,
>
> Why is it that 95% of online web portfolios I see aren't linked to the
> actual sites? It's baffling to me as it seems to bypass a major function
of
> this medium. I want to check out the work people are promoting, but alot
of
> the time I can't even see what the URL is from the screen capture. Is
there
> something I'm missing?
>
> Antony.
>
>
> ..H5 Babble Design List Info: http://www.highfive.com/h5/babble.html
> ..To unsubscribe, send the following one line to majordomo@highfive.com:
> ."unsubscribe (babble or babble-digest) (e-mail address)"
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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 08:31:06 -0600
From: "Allen Ayres" <AllenAyres@prodigy.net>
Subject: Re: Site critique

Jorge Hurtado wrote:
> here's the site that Ii worked on:
> http://exo.com/~hurtado/1.html
> Just wondering if I could get some advice form the best...
> just an overall critique..

</lurk>
I have been lurking in the background for a few months now and would like to
say that I have learned quite a bit.. you guys are the masters... (well
maybe the guy from the gabo site too, but he isn't here..:-)) I have finally
reduced my email by a couple hundred messages and hope that I may begin
taking part...
That said, the graphics do look good, I didn't catch the connection to the
high-five site... maybe Hanan was talking about the vertical stripes.
Otherwise, keep up the good work. I too, would have placed the scroll bar to
the outside edge, but what you have works... (does the stripe resize with
monitor size? I could not test it this morning.) The one on the left
disappears on the other deeper pages. You may want to lighten/brighten your
text on the black background, it would be more readable. Links to your
actual pages in the publishing section would be nice...
I hope that my first contribution made sense...(and I didn't even include
the whole #197 digest).

Allen Ayres

- - www.pd-newmedia.com - coming soon

- - "Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?"

- - "I almost saw Elvis, then my shovel broke"

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:53:05 -0500
From: Lance Arthur <larthur@dbtinc.com>
Subject: Inspiration & Theft

>Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 12:25:24 -0600
>From: Erik Kittlaus <erik@unidial.com>
>Subject: multiple frame swaps
>
>http://www.abmworldlink.com/redo/index.html

>Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:16:10 +1000
>From: "Craig Castledine" <ccastledine@dynamics.net>
>Subject: Re: multiple frame swaps
>
>Unbelievable !!
>Why don't you ask Lance Arthur, Eric, its his design. Gee....you ever
been
>to Glassdog? You can't just flip it and say its yours!

I'd like to use this opportunity to open a discussion about the trend of
interface repurposing. I would have to agree with Craig that Erik's
design looks remarkably similar to the one at glassdog. In general, I've
tried to keep an optimistic outlook about seeing things that I've
designed re-colored and manipulated then posted elsewhere. In most cases
I have no problem with it, because many times it has been done by
someone trying to figure out how something works, or they use it as a
foundation and build on it. Additionally, in cases where it is *not*
done for paying customers, when someone is building a personal,
not-for-profit site, I also don't particularly mind.

The difficulty here is that, unfortunately, people *can* take a design,
flip it, and call it their own. It is much the same as a musician taking
someone else's 8-note progression, changing the 8th note and caling it a
new song. And the copyrightability of "look and feel" has never been
settled in a court of law. The case of Lotus vs. Borland over 123 vs.
Quattro Pro was settled out of court. Copyright, under these
circumstances, will not protect you.

The Web is an intrinsically open environment. We can all see each
other's underwear. We can cut pieces of code out of a page and use it on
our own. The very thought of "owning" a frameset model is ludicrous.
JavaScripts get a little more iffy. When is it coding and when is it
scripting? Why *not* put a copyright notice in everything you create
considering it probably won't protect you anyway?

What I object to is a lack of credit, not a lack of monetary recompense.
While I believe that the design at abmworldlink.com has been liberally
borrowed from my own, there is nothing I can do about that. Because it
has been changed, it is in fact new code. Maggy Donea's entire site,
including splash page model and navigation, was recently "liberally
borrowed" and recolored by a design firm who then included a copyright
notice in their source code copyrighting not only all content, design,
interface and navigation elements but also the "look and feel" thereof,
implying that they would prosecute anyone else whose site resembled
theirs including, presumably, Maggy's from where they "received
inspiration." This also implies that they are the originator of that
interface.

As Web designers, this is all we have. What we make, what we create,
what we publicly post and share. I am not stupid enough to believe that
no one will take something from my pages and use it. I've done it in the
past, and probably most people have if only to figure out what that code
is doing before bending it to our needs.

I simply wish to voice my disappointment with the lack of creativity
that would force a designer to take what someone else has made and claim
it theirs. This happens all the time in every creative field. Where does
one draw the line between inspiration and theft? If you are being paid
for your talents, shouldn't you use them instead of someone else's? I
don't think there's a need to list one's inspirations inside each Web
site design, because I think the end product should be easy to
distinguish from what has gone before. There will always be
cookie-cutter design, many clients prefer a no-glitz, lo-cool, left-side
links, top-edge banner, black text on white sort of deal. At the same
time, this is my job. This is what I do. How will it look if a client
sees something that looks like my work somewhere else first? Who is
doing the copying then?

Lance
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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 15:56:16 +0100
From: Pascale Camus-Walter <camwal@cybercable.tm.fr>
Subject: linked portfolios

>
>Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 15:53:13 +1000
>From: Antony Richards <antony@mcmann-tate.com.au>
>Subject: Here's a question.
>
>Q,
>
>Why is it that 95% of online web portfolios I see aren't linked to the
>actual sites? It's baffling to me as it seems to bypass a major function of
>this medium. I want to check out the work people are promoting, but alot of
>the time I can't even see what the URL is from the screen capture. Is there
>something I'm missing?
>
I liked terribly the way to present the links in the portfolio:
http://www.zaw.tm.fr

Pascale Camus-Walter / Strasbourg camwal@cybercable.tm.fr
Il est plus facile de rayer l'obscurite que la lumiere. R. Juarroz
+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
artKfee: http://www.cybercable.tm.fr/~camwal/
The Waltercolour studio: http://geocities.datacellar.net/SoHo/Gallery/5806/
apastras: http://web.superb.net/apastras
+------------------------------------+----------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 16:26:57 +0100
From: Pascale Camus-Walter <camwal@cybercable.tm.fr>
Subject: Re: Plumb design

>Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 15:46:23 -0600
>From: Neal Thomas <nthomas@iisd.ca>
>Subject: URL to check out
>
>This is one of the most elegant things I've seen on the web in the last
>6 months to be sure:
>
>http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus/
>

I liked the design terribly, BUT:
Even with a fast connection (cable) it takes an eternity to load and is not
very efficient after that. Plus: I have a little screen and cannot reach
some parts of the design.
All these sophisticated technologies just make me mad. I feel always
frustrated because i don't always have : the good browser, the good
plugin, the good screen, the fastest connections, etc...
I dream from well designed AND *easy* to view sites.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 10:18:46 -0800
From: Christopher <chris@christopher.org>
Subject: RE: Here's a question.

On Wednesday, February 11, 1998 9:53 PM, Antony Richards wrote:
> Why is it that 95% of online web portfolios I see aren't linked to the
> actual sites? It's baffling to me as it seems to bypass a major function
of
> this medium. I want to check out the work people are promoting, but alot
of
> the time I can't even see what the URL is from the screen capture. Is
there
> something I'm missing?

Some reasons why some web firms don't point to the actual web sites are:
- the client starts maintaining their own site by hacking away at the HTML
code, inserts annoying clip art, etc.
- the site was temporary anyway.

Phoenix-Pop actually hosts the project they did for Samsung web site off
their own Web site, http://www.phoenix-pop.com/samsung. Better than a
screen capture, no?

Christopher Schmitt
new media designer
http://www.christopher.org/
Flash2 Animation FAQ Site
http://www.flashfaq.com/ - Coming Soon!

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 07:47:42 -0800
From: Suzanne <Suzanne@KickassDesign.com>
Subject: Re: Here's a question.

Through circumstances beyond our control, a lot of the Web design work
we've done over the past three years is no longer online, so we can't link
to it. Or, we've somehow lost creative control over the site so we don't
want to link to it. I finally learned to always keep a copy of our
original work in our own site folder. (I set up the meta tags so that the
site duplicates can't be found by search engines.) We're fortunate in that
we get our Web hosting as a trade deal, otherwise storing all this stuff on
our own site might be awfully expensive.

Suz

>Why is it that 95% of online web portfolios I see aren't linked to the
>actual sites? It's baffling to me as it seems to bypass a major function of
>this medium. I want to check out the work people are promoting, but alot of
>the time I can't even see what the URL is from the screen capture. Is there
>something I'm missing?
>
>Antony.

Suzanne Stephens
Co-Creative Director; StarSeed, Inc. 541-482-3000 or 541-535-4699
_________________________________________________________
Stephens Design, 541-535-4699 http://www.KickassDesign.com
CyberCircus Grand Prize Winners http://www.thecybercircus.com

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 10:34:44 -0500
From: Andrew Zimmerman <zimmerma@hear.net>
Subject: TECH/HTML DHTML webzine

Since its been relatively slow (barring OT posts) I thought I'd shove
this at you all.

http://www.htmlguru.com/resources/pure/pure_guru_no1.htm

If you are interested in looking at a DHTML tutorial and have a fast
connection you may wish to check this out. Imagine the possibilities of
or not sticking to a "flat" or static page.

While still on the horizon I think DHTML is a good thing to look into
*now*. Maybe professional designers can help mold the direction these
techniques will develop.

Hope you're having a good day,
AZ

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 11:42:21 -0500
From: "Aimee Lingman" <aimeel@mail.sundialnw.com>
Subject: Pet Peeve about Dreamweaver

Ok folks.

Is there any way in dreamweaver that I can specify that I want my workspace
larger, ie. 1500 pixels long? It is resizing the length of my page every
time I move something up and I mean, I like a little room to work in....

- -aim

Aimee Lingman
S u n d i a l
www.sundialnw.com
Home of Valentino: a different kind of cupid.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:59:01 +0100
From: Junior van der Stel <junior@limage-dangereuse.nl>
Subject: Explorer scripting ?!?

Hello,

my question is a bit general. Does anyone know of a site or a book where you can
"translate" Netscape javascript into
Explorer scripting, jscript or vb script or whatever. I'm not looking for a
program, just for some documentation on
how Explorer scripting works and maybe some alternatives for standard Netscape
javascript.

I like my pages to be accesable to both Netscape and Explorer users, both most of
my nice ideas only work for
Netscape users.

Anyone a suggestion??

Junior

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:38:37 -0800
From: "Jorge Hurtado" <hurtado@exo.com>
Subject: Re: Site critique

Hello babblers,

After carefully reading your comments, I have to agree your points are valid
and well taken...
The design part of the site was heavily influenced by the 1st best site I
was drawn to, High Five.
I will definitely expand my creativity and try to go beyond that but, there
is a point to be made:

Some actually got very upset with this site to my surprise. Good design and
good art ARE inspirations and many artists/designers "copy" in order to
create and to use it as a starting point. Since I'm not a programmer or
experienced HTML designer, my first attempt will, of course resemble already
done work.. so, pleeease be a little be more understanding so we can all
learn from our mistakes. Now, about the illustration stuff, that's what I
do for a living and those images ARE my work. Of course you can download
them, print them for your kids, etc.. But since they belong to me, you can
not make a business out of them (you can't re-use them for commercial
purposes...) That is what I meant by "private property" Should I have used
another phrase? please advise me.

thanks babblers, it's a pleasure to have you critique my work and thank you
for your always helpful comments.

Always and sincerely,

Jorge Hurtado.

>I will try to be kind ...
>The background of the main window is an "attribute" to HighFive.
>(and then in the Drawings section you write :All images in this page are
>private property.
>Please do not use the images for any comercial purpose.)
>
>I am not clear on why the scroll bar of the main window should be inside
>the frameset and not the the edge.
>
>Text on the balck background should be more visible.
>
>I don't understand the numbers at the top frame.
>
>I don't understand the drawing at the left frame and it's purpose.
>
>
>Good luck in you designs.
>
>--
>Hanan Cohen
>Bashan systems - Jerusalem
>
>***Love and Peace***
>..H5 Babble Design List Info: http://www.highfive.com/h5/babble.html
>..To unsubscribe, send the following one line to majordomo@highfive.com:
>."unsubscribe (babble or babble-digest) (e-mail address)"
------------------------------

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:51:58 +0000
From: awilson <awilson@digev.com>
Subject: Re: babble-digest V1 #197

Probably because the art being displayed is outdated or no longer being used.In
this ever-changing landscape of the web, design is as static as a squirrel on
crack.

>
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 15:53:13 +1000
> From: Antony Richards <antony@mcmann-tate.com.au>
> Subject: Here's a question.
>
> Q,
>
> Why is it that 95% of online web portfolios I see aren't linked to the
> actual sites? It's baffling to me as it seems to bypass a major function of
> this medium. I want to check out the work people are promoting, but alot of
> the time I can't even see what the URL is from the screen capture. Is there
> something I'm missing?
>
> Antony.

andy wilson, graphic designer
digital evolution - brentwood, ca.
awilson@digev.com - http://www.digev.com

------------------------------

End of babble-digest V1 #198
****************************

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