Albino Black Sheep

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/




Albino Black Sheep is a site which hosts flash videos, flash games, users can also upload music to the website. Albinoblacksheep has a very nice site layout which makes it easy for the user to navigate. At the top other the homepage they have a box with all the popular featured flash videos & flash games. Each section has a similar layout with promoted videos at the top and then a category view to browser content.

All the content is user made and anyone is free to create a account and upload on to Albinoblacksheep. Albinoblacksheep is responsible for quite a few popular videos on the internet which have found there way in the mainstream part of the internet. Some examplesyou might of heard of are, Badger, badger, badger, The Ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny, Salad fingers & Peanut Butter Jelly i'm sure theres more but there the ones i can think from the top of my head.

Other notable flash movies the less well know ones some of my favourites
The Demented Cartoon Movie <--- 33minutes of genious
The french Erotic film
The end of the world


I really like this site and others like it, and hope that some of the content influences and reflects in my work.

Building ::Structure::Environment, Ideas Stage

We have been asked to find a building, gallery, structure, environment that would be suitable as a subject for a website.

Design build and deploy a minimum 5 page website that is validated to WC3 standards and includes at least 3 interactive javascript routines.


Ideas
These are the ideas i wrote down

-Pub up the road, "The Golden Fleece"
-Nottingham Square
-Website about sand??? well its here because i wrote it down
-A boat
-Boots Libary
-Inside a train.



Intial thoughts is i think the boots libary would be good choice as it has easy access for informations and images for the website, the other ideas are still good but at the moment its more towards the boots libary.

and heres a picture of the boots libary



Picture source

Internet Maps

First a good example of a internet map




The picture posted above is great, when we were asked to make a map of the internet with post it notes, we started by putting the most popular sites visted nearer the top and made a nice hirearchy of Popular sites and past times on the internet, with more popular at the top and least popular at the bottom.



Although it is difficult to make out what the post its read i will explain it here, at the top of the board we had Google personally i don't think anything can be more popular than google at present. Google is everywhere on the internet and even when you not looking for it.

Underneath Google is the rest of the internet i'll call it level 2, there was facebook, Youtube, ebay.

Under that BBC iplayer, flickr, bebo, twitter

Then the rest of the internet follows, but thinking about this whats defined as popular by us from the UK would/might be different to say in America not by much, but China i think if they were to make a list it would look very different to what we made.

However in about 5 years it will look different again, and will keep evolving until the internet becomes self aware and refuses to be used by humans and ultimately declares war on humans.


Lighter note i found a nice websites which tells everyone the 50 most popular websites.

http://mostpopularwebsites.net/

Design interviews read & comment

Two articles read & comment.

Joel Schafer: 'I'm into minimalistic clean design'

Dan Saffer: 'Interaction design is an applied art

Joel Schafer

This was the second article i read, i found it too be quite breif and not really go into as much detail as the other one. I didn't really find the article that intresting there were a few key points like what computer language is needed and the useful links at the bottom of the page but other than that it wasn't really that informative.


Dan Saffer

The first article i read was and still better than the second, the answers are much more thougher and go into more detail. The areas which stood out for me were talking about how we as interactive designers will come to use the touch screen and should be well educated with how it works and what can be done with it. I think that as designers we should probably understand and have knowledge of what were designing for until the next new peice of technology comes along and we have to start over again. The other point he raised was mistakes by good designers not coming up with different designs, i think thats a useful bit of information to know.

Three sites lead by the People

DRAWBALL

http://www.drawball.com/

Drawball.com, as the name implies, is a Flash site where you draw freehand inside a giant ball. Drawball consists of two balls, one for more serious, legitimate drawing, and another for vandalism. All the art on drawball is generated by the users and anything can be drawn or drawn over so there will always be new content generated. Drawball is free for anyone to use and you don’t need to download any software (except maybe flash), no sign up is required there is also a forum where you can post/show off the work users have done and claim credit for it.

Screenshot of Drawball from a few months ago.




Sketch Swap

http://www.sketchswap.com/

Sketchswap.com is a site that allows users to draw something on screen then submit it to sketchswap & receive another a picture another user has drawn. Users can draw as little or as much as they want to recive a picture. When reciveing a picture it is drawn in a nice animation of how the user drew it. The site on whole is very easy to use as there is only one page & a large white box to draw in using the mouse. There is not really much of a user community to go with the website, a couple of google searches led me to articles but no community. People again can draw win anonymity.

Sketch i recieved




YTMND

http://ytmnd.com/

Your The Man Now Dog is a is an online community centered on the creation of hosted web pages, users can sign up and submit there designs and YTMND will host them. Most of YTMND consists of Pictures & music added together making a reference too popular culture or inside jokes. Most of the content which is uploaded on to YTMND is from all over the internet and recycled into even more crap. YTMND is a good example of user lead websites beacuse it allows user freedom to design whatever they want and if its popular becomes a "fad". The site is also very easy to navigate and with a nice search tool.

Example of YTMND's

Boris Vs the germans

Internet

The site which started it all.