Smashing Magazine have put together yet another amazing trawl of motion graphics. This is a great reference for students, especially for my third year Visual Communication students who will be working on a title sequence project for IADT undergraduate films in March 2009. We have worked on this project every year for the last five years with increasing success and I hope to update the our programme website with a ‘best of’ compilation of the students work shortly. It is possible to view some of the students work on their individual portfolio websites here.

Massive Attack, Royal Festival Hall from jbarahona on Vimeo.

This video backdrop for Massive Attack was created by United Visual Artists. Its MA’s most explicitly political piece yet and includes references to rendition flight numbers etc. The message is both visually and semantically powerful, and expertly sychronised to the music.

Everyone thinks it won’t happen to them. Well it did. This site was hacked and officially flat-lined in Google analytics. Yikes! Anyway, its temporarily fixed, but it does mean that I will have to make some significant changes behind the scenes, which is time consuming. Send me a mail if you notice anything strange. Also, watch out anyone who is using WordPress as the problem seems to have been fairly rampant, its well documented on the boards.

SVN always advocate designing directly in HTML/CSS rather than creating Photoshop mock-ups of page layouts first. They view working in Photoshop as a redundant activity that does not really advance the design process. Rather, it adds an unnecessary intermediate stage that disrupts the main goal of any project which is getting to the final built website. This is a pretty contentious viewpoint as it presupposes that all web designers should be technically proficient in HTML/CSS, which of course they aren’t.

While it makes sense that web designers should understand the scope of and limitations of HTML/CSS and be aware of the main issues such as cross-browser consistency etc, there are many designers who wouldn’t be able to build sample page layouts without some technical support. Additionally, the other main drawback of this stance, is that it puts the tool before the design. Effectively the tool is dictating the nature of the design. Designers should be free to work out a design first and to then figure out (with assistance if required) how to build it with whatever subsequent modifications or compromises that are required.

Good design examples are hard to find on the web, and the few exemplary sites in existence (subtraction or l2m3) really push the boat out in terms of CSS typographic specification. However, these sites clearly evidence an attention to typographic detail that is painstakingly implemented. Good design and typography on the web takes time and effort and it is not merely a functional activity where usability outranks aesthetic considerations as perhaps SVN and the school of Jakob Nielsen suggest. If it did, the web would become a very dull place where ideas and creativity were subservient to rationality and function. A healthy balance is surely always a good thing.

If creative effort isn’t enabled, the space for innovation diminishes. Already, popular blog themes (some are very well designed) have become so prevalent and repetitious that it is getting harder for anything different to emerge from the blogosphere or indeed web design in general.