Evaluation

The majority of my work is animated, so I wanted my portfolio website to be animated. I was unsure whether my website should be more serious, but animators are generally laid back, creative and imaginative people, so I felt my website would fit in. I quite like the simple effect of it. The black background works well with the coloured moving text - although I was worried that there would be too much moving on each page, but animated website always a have a lot going on.

I had a lot of problems with producing the buttons I wanted. I wanted all the text to be animated, so it would fit in with the theme of my animated website. I also wanted the text to be buttons, I decided to do this in Flash - however I had never done this before, so I had to teach myself. I had to make a hidden button underneath the text (a black box - which did not appear to change on the up/over/down/hit options). I had this working on the PC; unfortunately I had to change all the urls when it was transferred onto the iMac. In the end, I had to redo the buttons completely because the files had changed locations, so the urls were incorrect and would not work. This was incredibly frustrating. I had also chosen a font, which was not available on the iMac, I thought saving it as an image would be ok, but because of the editing/redoing I needed to do on the iMac, it couldn't be edited. I had to upload the chosen font a day later.

I only uploaded two of my animations onto the website and initially I did not have enough space for even these - I had to expand my web-space. I decided to put some of my model making photos on it as well, a contrast from the animation. I optimised the images and placed them in a grid, which when clicked on, opens up a new page with a larger image. I liked the previous and next buttons I used on these pages, as it made it more accessible and easy to navigate.

I do not think my website is as creative as other animation websites, it is more basic, simple block design. With more time, and more web-space I would add extra animations for each page. For instance, when a button is clicked, a character would run across the page. I will definately be updating my website and putting it onine for an available portfolio.

Making buttons

I want to make my website very animated to fit in with the animation theme. I will make the buttons on Flash.

























This is how one of the buttons will look - the letters will move about.

I had to make an "invisible" button behind the moving text and then enter the correct url address for the button. I wasn't sure whether there would be too much movement on the page with several words moving about, but I quite liked all the movement on the page - it made it more interesting.

My webpage idea

page1 - main page
page2 - contents
page3 - blackfoot roll animation
page4 - loki animation
page5 - otherstuff contents
page6 - model making page
page7 - cv?
page8 - 15 - model images

Webpages I like

The majority of my work is animation, so I want my website just to show animations, although I think a few other types of work will give it a good balance.

I particularly like the Aardman website and how everything is animated on there





















The Mr. Scruff website is also very good

Using Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a lot easier than html coding.

Introduction to web design

Initially we looked at basic html coding.

















We made a simple webpage experimenting with colour, font, sizing and simple layout. You have to be careful to spell things correctly - with American English.

Then we added images off google.