Sorry, and with all do respect to your web design skill, but that site is total garbage for the simple fact that the text within the window is MUCH TOO SMALL AND CANNOT BE ADJUSTED (with the flash window). I frigging hate that. Maybe your client wants it that way, so you have no choice, but it's still a stupid way to lay out a page. It's only marginally acceptable on an 17" @800x600, I shudder at the thought of using it on a 15" screen, or any higher-res setting on a large monitor. The rest of it could be brilliant, but if reading it is a pain in the ass (or eyes) then it's just not very good.
[QB]Sorry, and with all do respect to your web design skill, but that site is total garbage for the simple fact that the text within the window is MUCH TOO SMALL AND CANNOT BE ADJUSTED (with the flash window). I frigging hate that. Maybe your client wants it that way, so you have no choice, but it's still a stupid way to lay out a page.
Trust me I know what I am doing - I resent you bad manners and suggest you stick to the 'paper weight supplier' html sites I know you design so well -
I only ever used this thread to ask about resolution. The client was very happy with that site and it won a Revolution Award here in the UK (revolution is an industry magazine) - the back end of the site is like NASA!
They dont come much bigger than Lloyds of London and I have had no complaints. hey are a massive world company and hoem to the Richard Rogers llyods building - I design in 1024x768 with the knowledge that a flash frame at 780x426 will work fine in 800x600.
Pixel acurate fonts of 8 or 9 work fine in those resolution - who the hell is building sites for anything higher than 1024x768 - I know of noone - and still the industry standard is 800x600 where the flash pixel fonts work fine.
Not to use this as a vechile to brag but I feel obliged to myself to tell you (Mr.That site is Garbage) that I have won 5 macromedia Flash Awards.
Check the site for the band the Fun Lovin Criminals at
This won A Macromedia award too and was one of the most succesful banners (in terms of click through rate) ever witnessed in Ecommerce and Microsoft UK regard it as their best banner ever - believe me I know what I am doing and I hope that you realise that designing for anythign higher that 1024x768 is a bad move
hmm, call me crazy, but i don't understand why it's bad to design a site with flexability vs. a site that's unflexable.
i know the way you set it up you can guarentee what the layout will be like, but it doesn't take into account what the user has set on their end.
seems to me that your first concern would be whether or not the site is readable by the client, not if it's pretty to designers.
i can tell you right now that on a 21" monitor (well above average) the site is barely readable at 1024x768. at 1280x1024 (pretty standard on a 21") it's hard to read.
is there some way to make sizeable text in flash?
perhaps develop a window with larger and smaller fonts?
not everyone has young eyes, or large monitors, and small fonts can be very hard to read for these folks.
I'm a web designer and I'm currently looking at that site through an iBook (12.1" 1024 x 768) and I didn't even notice the text being at all unreadble... in fact I doubted for a second that we were even talking about the same site?! The text is perfectly legible to me. However, I think the resolution on the new TiBooks is excellent; I thought the res on this iBook was going to be inappropriate but I'm used to it and I think it works great.
kittylitterdesign, I once designed a site which was to-the-pixel and the client wasn't happy with it (saying that the text's too small, site doesn't make use of the whole screen, etc.) so I had to resort to having the flash movie scale to fill up the entire screen... v. annoying... so I'd count yourself lucky that Lloyds didn't say something on the same lines!
Where in the UK are u based? And how many ppl do u have working for/with u?
Actually Mr Kitty Litter design, I design NOTHING WELL, I don't do web design, have no training, and don't know how apart from a highly pathetic personal web page.
What I do have are two horrible POS excuses for eyes. Thusly, no matter how good it looks, and it looks nice, if I can't read it COMFORTABLY, then it does me no good.
You have to think about what the average slob (me) will experience when reading the site. We don't want to experience squintiness of any sort. Whenever I read a web page I max the font out to whatever the page/browser will tolerate without fvcking up the formatting too much.
You guys (pros) have much more tolerance for fine detail than the average user. Why? Because your trained to look for all kinds of subtle things that make layouts and pages look good. You love neat tricks and new interactive paradigms. You're pleased by good design (as we all are) but aesthetics and innovation rule your perspective a little more strongly than for the rest of us.
Just for the sake of argument (and because we all work very hard in here ) I showed your page and this thread around my cubicle/office.*** I'm the youngest person here, but between another grad student and two middle aged (sorry <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> , yet very beautiful OK.) women, we all agree: a, that I'm rude, and b, that 8 pt text on a 17" monitor is too small. We have crappy -- middling flat CRT's (17-19"), though I'm sure the experience is more tolerable under the improved crispness and contrast of an LCD.
Granted, there isn't too much reading to do on that page, but 10-12 point fonts wouldn't kill you, and the all the poor myopic slobs out there (like me) would be forever greatful at the prospect of not only appreciating the design, but also reading the text without getting a headache, or constantly flicking the resolution around.
*** We are currently enjoying your version of asteriods -- a very much neeeded distraction from solitaire and Yahoo Pool. Isn't the public sector grand?
kittylitterdesign, I have to say you have "mad Skillz" as they say. The flash interfaces on the sites of yours that i have seen are very very nice, a cut above the rest.
I have to say though, I do agree that the text sizes you use are too small. Not a lot too small, just a little bit too small. It feels a bit like you are designing for 800x600 still, when pretty much everyone is using 1024x768.
I realise that it can be a little hard (or at least annoying) to design well for 1024x768 when you are using a higher resolution, but you can always scale the resolution down. The LCDs on Apple machines do scale pretty well (still probably not acceptable though).
Anyway, I don't want to give you the illusion that I think you are a hack, I think your designs kick butt. Just the text is a little small, that's all.
BTW, Have you seen the flash inerface at lennykravitz.com? It is pretty cool.
<strong>Is the new screen resolution on the 667 and 800 powerbook G4 too small? Can anyone let me know if they have seen it and think that it is too small and fonts etc are tiny. The new ones have increased resolution at 1280-by-854.
This is the resolution I am enquiring about as to its smallness.
I went to see it in a store on display - It looked impratical and rediculously small. I would like to know anyones thoughts.
I simply think the new screen reoslution is god aweful and rubbish for web designers as it is no good for flash fonts or for getting an idea of what it will look like on other machines.
When you down the resolution in the new model to 1152 x 768 it goes fuzzy -
The site has standard7 font in the lower part whre it says about us news etc - and to the left hand side it has Hooge8 font where it says ..please select by moving cursor.
At a higher resolution I can imagine this text being UNreadable?
<strong>I simply think the new screen reoslution is god aweful and rubbish for web designers as it is no good for flash fonts or for getting an idea of what it will look like on other machines.
When you down the resolution in the new model to 1152 x 768 it goes fuzzy -
A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE MOVE BY APPLE
rubbish!</strong><hr></blockquote>
Pathetic. Don't use 9 pixels bitmap fonts and you don't have to whine about resolution. The resolution of screens will get higher, you like it or you don't.
i havent seen the new DVI powerbooks' screen yet but i presume they're pixelwise quite like those in 12 inch ibooks (i own one). That dpi ratio is perfectly ok (am 31) for your eyes IMHO, keep in mind you'll have a laptop screen closer than a desktop tft/crt. All that said, i must admit 9 point in Word maybe too small (depending on the font) and you might zoom in to write more comfortably.
what i consider a hugh mistake is Dell's current 1600x1200pix in 15" laptops, i'm sure that must be hurting them sales.
anyway, the true is that we're all acustomed to much higher dpi ratios. Typical paper mags may go up to 200 dpi (im sort of misleading dpi with ppi, but anyhow im european and here we measure with centimeters/mms), so the problem is not about increasing the dpi but about contrast, brightness and a fixed font size ratio.
over here the majority of webs are designed with a 800x600 pix default (the typical screen the boss buys to employees is still 15") and webdesigners use to define font size as well as the whole web in pixels so to not loose control of the overall page layout (but that implies the denser in ppi the screen is the smaller everything will look like).
If you do it that way i'd never use fonts smaller than 10px. (take a look at this one i did some time ago <a href="http://www.altamirages.com"; target="_blank">altamirages</a> )
i think your lloyds web text size is a little too much on the small side. Specially for the target it's destined for (40+ years old people, i guess?). Secondly, bear in mind your colors are in "negative" and is easier to read black text on white than the opposite.
besides that, excellent design, and what an stellar banner. You're very VERY good at that.
PS: BTW the other day i turned on an old LC with the original 13RGB Apple monitor at its native 640x480. WOW i forgot how BIG EVERYTHING WAS back then! <img src="graemlins/surprised.gif" border="0" alt="[Surprised]" />
You know, we're squabbling here about aesthetics and the design of current sites, but the fact is that we MUST make progress where DPI is concerned eventually. Self-assembling organic LED monitors are going to be available, and sooner than you might think. Displays will be capable of not 72 DPI, not 96 DPI, but orders of magnitude higher. Many suspect we'll eventuallly have monitors capable of higher resolution than magazine print today.
A few years back, many in the web-development community thought all sites should be designed for a 640x480 monitor at eight bpp, with no animation. Now these ranks have thinned, because although it's nicely democratic to design a site for everyone that way, most people have moved on, and a 640x480 page tends to be hard to read and navigate. One can't fit enough content on the page, and animation is fundamental to organizing thought.
So someone's going to take that first step, making the extra pixels available. And then web-designers are going to see that most people are having a little trouble seeing things, and have more room, so they'll start using bigger fonts, or the "pt" designations will become more abstract measurements, and the browser will scale anything on the page, including Flash. It'll happen soon. Technology always works this way. Can one have lived with computers to adulthood without seeing this cycle dozens of times? Basing notebook monitor pitch on the inability of one version of one plug-in to scale text would be monumentally unvisionary, and a cheat to Apple's customers. For all we know, Flash's text handling could change tomorrrow. In fact, isn't Macromedia already tussling with and XML based SVG format, to see who'll define the new ere of scalable web-graphics?
Examine a cheap inkjet printer. Mine prints 2400x1200 DPI. You can sure bet that if I printed something on that at a true 9pt font I couldn't read it. First, it would be smaller than a comma usually is, only a hundredth of an inch tall. Second, each character would be twice as wide as it was high. Yet I print pages with "9pt fonts" on that printer, and I read them. The printer driver renders the text at scaled dimensions, and thus delivers smooth, readable text. Points mean something different to professional print shops, and the computer world has nailed them down to a strange pixel standard.
As a practical matter on the new TiBooks, the point of Mac OS X's Quartz layer is that a vector-based rendering system will allow Apple to scale items for higher-density monitors later on. The new Zoom tool in Jaguar will let a user traverse any part of the desktop at any size he or she wishes, and smoothly render each element at that magnification. Take that double-wide TiBook screen. Fill one half with a webpage. Use Zoom to double it. BAM! Readable, scrollable, watchable, in fact more so than if the resolution hadn't been increased. Zoom is supposed to affect everything, plug-ins included, for accessibility reasons. If it doesn't, if it turns out classic is blacked-out or plug-ins other than Quicktime have problems at first, one can always wait for the new SVG pages that are sprouting up, including Flash's new vector capabilities. It's not as though Flash-based web-pages are intended to last unchanged for decades.
SVG? Jaguar Zoom? No need. I use Flash from version 2 and it was always possible to embed the Flash movie into the HTML to fit the height and the width of the browser window. So the website visitor can scale the Flash movie together with the browser window. This called scalable vectorgraphics! The problem is that Mr. Award-winner Designers (following the trend like sheeps) embed bitmap fonts (smaller is better) into the Flash movies, so of course they set the movies to fixed size. What a surprise: here comes the resolution problem!
[quote] it was always possible to embed the Flash movie into the HTML to fit the height and the width of the browser window. So the website visitor can scale the Flash movie together with the browser window. This called scalable vectorgraphics! The problem is that Mr. Award-winner Designers (following the trend like sheeps) embed bitmap fonts (smaller is better) into the Flash movies, so of course they set the movies to fixed size <hr></blockquote>
So the website visitor can scale the Flash movie together with the browser window. This called scalable vectorgraphics!<hr></blockquote>
That is a aweful way to do it! that is total rubbish - when the flash movie resizes so does the jpgs within and it goes all pixalated.
Lets face it Apple WILL see sense and return t o the old resolution for the powerbook - there are thousands of people I have read reports of not buying this new edition because of this - what a turkey of an idea <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
Comments
Sorry, major pet peeve of mine.
[QB]Sorry, and with all do respect to your web design skill, but that site is total garbage for the simple fact that the text within the window is MUCH TOO SMALL AND CANNOT BE ADJUSTED (with the flash window). I frigging hate that. Maybe your client wants it that way, so you have no choice, but it's still a stupid way to lay out a page.
Trust me I know what I am doing - I resent you bad manners and suggest you stick to the 'paper weight supplier' html sites I know you design so well -
I only ever used this thread to ask about resolution. The client was very happy with that site and it won a Revolution Award here in the UK (revolution is an industry magazine) - the back end of the site is like NASA!
They dont come much bigger than Lloyds of London and I have had no complaints. hey are a massive world company and hoem to the Richard Rogers llyods building - I design in 1024x768 with the knowledge that a flash frame at 780x426 will work fine in 800x600.
Pixel acurate fonts of 8 or 9 work fine in those resolution - who the hell is building sites for anything higher than 1024x768 - I know of noone - and still the industry standard is 800x600 where the flash pixel fonts work fine.
Not to use this as a vechile to brag but I feel obliged to myself to tell you (Mr.That site is Garbage) that I have won 5 macromedia Flash Awards.
Check the site for the band the Fun Lovin Criminals at
<a href="http://www.fun-lovin-criminals.com"; target="_blank">http://www.fun-lovin-criminals.com</a>;
Check source code to see my name if in doubt
I could go on but I will be in danger of coming across as a bad loser - but I just feel annoyed at your flippant remark.
I also won campign of the month for my Xbox banners - view them at <a href="http://www.hedgeapple.co.uk/banners/xbox"; target="_blank">http://www.hedgeapple.co.uk/banners/xbox</a>;
This won A Macromedia award too and was one of the most succesful banners (in terms of click through rate) ever witnessed in Ecommerce and Microsoft UK regard it as their best banner ever - believe me I know what I am doing and I hope that you realise that designing for anythign higher that 1024x768 is a bad move
Good luck to ya
Jools
i know the way you set it up you can guarentee what the layout will be like, but it doesn't take into account what the user has set on their end.
seems to me that your first concern would be whether or not the site is readable by the client, not if it's pretty to designers.
i can tell you right now that on a 21" monitor (well above average) the site is barely readable at 1024x768. at 1280x1024 (pretty standard on a 21") it's hard to read.
is there some way to make sizeable text in flash?
perhaps develop a window with larger and smaller fonts?
not everyone has young eyes, or large monitors, and small fonts can be very hard to read for these folks.
-alcimedes
No there is not.
kittylitterdesign, I once designed a site which was to-the-pixel and the client wasn't happy with it (saying that the text's too small, site doesn't make use of the whole screen, etc.) so I had to resort to having the flash movie scale to fill up the entire screen... v. annoying... so I'd count yourself lucky that Lloyds didn't say something on the same lines!
Where in the UK are u based? And how many ppl do u have working for/with u?
What I do have are two horrible POS excuses for eyes. Thusly, no matter how good it looks, and it looks nice, if I can't read it COMFORTABLY, then it does me no good.
You have to think about what the average slob (me) will experience when reading the site. We don't want to experience squintiness of any sort. Whenever I read a web page I max the font out to whatever the page/browser will tolerate without fvcking up the formatting too much.
You guys (pros) have much more tolerance for fine detail than the average user. Why? Because your trained to look for all kinds of subtle things that make layouts and pages look good. You love neat tricks and new interactive paradigms. You're pleased by good design (as we all are) but aesthetics and innovation rule your perspective a little more strongly than for the rest of us.
Just for the sake of argument (and because we all work very hard in here
Granted, there isn't too much reading to do on that page, but 10-12 point fonts wouldn't kill you, and the all the poor myopic slobs out there (like me) would be forever greatful at the prospect of not only appreciating the design, but also reading the text without getting a headache, or constantly flicking the resolution around.
*** We are currently enjoying your version of asteriods -- a very much neeeded distraction from solitaire and Yahoo Pool.
I have to say though, I do agree that the text sizes you use are too small. Not a lot too small, just a little bit too small. It feels a bit like you are designing for 800x600 still, when pretty much everyone is using 1024x768.
I realise that it can be a little hard (or at least annoying) to design well for 1024x768 when you are using a higher resolution, but you can always scale the resolution down. The LCDs on Apple machines do scale pretty well (still probably not acceptable though).
Anyway, I don't want to give you the illusion that I think you are a hack, I think your designs kick butt. Just the text is a little small, that's all.
BTW, Have you seen the flash inerface at lennykravitz.com? It is pretty cool.
--PB
<strong>Is the new screen resolution on the 667 and 800 powerbook G4 too small? Can anyone let me know if they have seen it and think that it is too small and fonts etc are tiny. The new ones have increased resolution at 1280-by-854.
This is the resolution I am enquiring about as to its smallness.
I went to see it in a store on display - It looked impratical and rediculously small. I would like to know anyones thoughts.
Hi
When you down the resolution in the new model to 1152 x 768 it goes fuzzy -
A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE MOVE BY APPLE
rubbish!
Can someone report back to me and tel me if a site such as <a href="http://www.lorealpro.net/"; target="_blank">http://www.lorealpro.net/</a>; reads ok in this new resolution.
The site has standard7 font in the lower part whre it says about us news etc - and to the left hand side it has Hooge8 font where it says ..please select by moving cursor.
At a higher resolution I can imagine this text being UNreadable?
<strong>I simply think the new screen reoslution is god aweful and rubbish for web designers as it is no good for flash fonts or for getting an idea of what it will look like on other machines.
When you down the resolution in the new model to 1152 x 768 it goes fuzzy -
A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE MOVE BY APPLE
rubbish!</strong><hr></blockquote>
Pathetic. Don't use 9 pixels bitmap fonts and you don't have to whine about resolution. The resolution of screens will get higher, you like it or you don't.
<strong>
Pathetic. Don't use 9 pixels </strong><hr></blockquote>
Now I see you use 7 and 8 pixels fonts... Ehh...
i havent seen the new DVI powerbooks' screen yet but i presume they're pixelwise quite like those in 12 inch ibooks (i own one). That dpi ratio is perfectly ok (am 31) for your eyes IMHO, keep in mind you'll have a laptop screen closer than a desktop tft/crt. All that said, i must admit 9 point in Word maybe too small (depending on the font) and you might zoom in to write more comfortably.
what i consider a hugh mistake is Dell's current 1600x1200pix in 15" laptops, i'm sure that must be hurting them sales.
anyway, the true is that we're all acustomed to much higher dpi ratios. Typical paper mags may go up to 200 dpi (im sort of misleading dpi with ppi, but anyhow im european and here we measure with centimeters/mms), so the problem is not about increasing the dpi but about contrast, brightness and a fixed font size ratio.
over here the majority of webs are designed with a 800x600 pix default (the typical screen the boss buys to employees is still 15") and webdesigners use to define font size as well as the whole web in pixels so to not loose control of the overall page layout (but that implies the denser in ppi the screen is the smaller everything will look like).
If you do it that way i'd never use fonts smaller than 10px. (take a look at this one i did some time ago <a href="http://www.altamirages.com"; target="_blank">altamirages</a> )
i think your lloyds web text size is a little too much on the small side. Specially for the target it's destined for (40+ years old people, i guess?). Secondly, bear in mind your colors are in "negative" and is easier to read black text on white than the opposite.
besides that, excellent design, and what an stellar banner. You're very VERY good at that.
PS: BTW the other day i turned on an old LC with the original 13RGB Apple monitor at its native 640x480. WOW i forgot how BIG EVERYTHING WAS back then! <img src="graemlins/surprised.gif" border="0" alt="[Surprised]" />
[ 06-18-2002: Message edited by: jindrich ]</p>
the L'Oreal site is amazing... as are the other things...
I dont know if you've designed these with your new Ti but I can tell you that at 1024x768 everything is perfectly legible and looks fine.
iBook 14inch
<strong>
When you down the resolution in the new model to 1152 x 768 it goes fuzzy -
A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE MOVE BY APPLE
rubbish!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Most LCDs get fuzzy when you use a resolution that isn't the native.
A few years back, many in the web-development community thought all sites should be designed for a 640x480 monitor at eight bpp, with no animation. Now these ranks have thinned, because although it's nicely democratic to design a site for everyone that way, most people have moved on, and a 640x480 page tends to be hard to read and navigate. One can't fit enough content on the page, and animation is fundamental to organizing thought.
So someone's going to take that first step, making the extra pixels available. And then web-designers are going to see that most people are having a little trouble seeing things, and have more room, so they'll start using bigger fonts, or the "pt" designations will become more abstract measurements, and the browser will scale anything on the page, including Flash. It'll happen soon. Technology always works this way. Can one have lived with computers to adulthood without seeing this cycle dozens of times? Basing notebook monitor pitch on the inability of one version of one plug-in to scale text would be monumentally unvisionary, and a cheat to Apple's customers. For all we know, Flash's text handling could change tomorrrow. In fact, isn't Macromedia already tussling with and XML based SVG format, to see who'll define the new ere of scalable web-graphics?
Examine a cheap inkjet printer. Mine prints 2400x1200 DPI. You can sure bet that if I printed something on that at a true 9pt font I couldn't read it. First, it would be smaller than a comma usually is, only a hundredth of an inch tall. Second, each character would be twice as wide as it was high. Yet I print pages with "9pt fonts" on that printer, and I read them. The printer driver renders the text at scaled dimensions, and thus delivers smooth, readable text. Points mean something different to professional print shops, and the computer world has nailed them down to a strange pixel standard.
As a practical matter on the new TiBooks, the point of Mac OS X's Quartz layer is that a vector-based rendering system will allow Apple to scale items for higher-density monitors later on. The new Zoom tool in Jaguar will let a user traverse any part of the desktop at any size he or she wishes, and smoothly render each element at that magnification. Take that double-wide TiBook screen. Fill one half with a webpage. Use Zoom to double it. BAM! Readable, scrollable, watchable, in fact more so than if the resolution hadn't been increased. Zoom is supposed to affect everything, plug-ins included, for accessibility reasons. If it doesn't, if it turns out classic is blacked-out or plug-ins other than Quicktime have problems at first, one can always wait for the new SVG pages that are sprouting up, including Flash's new vector capabilities. It's not as though Flash-based web-pages are intended to last unchanged for decades.
[Edited for grammar and spelling.]
[ 06-18-2002: Message edited by: AllenChristopher ]</p>
ditto
So the website visitor can scale the Flash movie together with the browser window. This called scalable vectorgraphics!<hr></blockquote>
That is a aweful way to do it! that is total rubbish - when the flash movie resizes so does the jpgs within and it goes all pixalated.
Lets face it Apple WILL see sense and return t o the old resolution for the powerbook - there are thousands of people I have read reports of not buying this new edition because of this - what a turkey of an idea <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />