The Natural Confectionery Company

I really like this website! It's cute with a fun design and also fun content. Go take a look!

Also:

Java Jive

This cute little animation depicts the life of a coffee bean in 1 minute and 54 seconds. Created by Kristyna Baczynski, all the visuals are hand drawn then coloured in Photoshop, before being edited in Final Cut. The animation won first prize in the digital media category of the Northern Design Competition. I love the music too :)

Building, structure, environment?

I've been thinking about this on and off since the task appeared on the NOW, but my ideas are all really vague at the moment... I don't want to take on this brief too literally and make a website for some boring old building like a shop or a restaurant. Well I guess it depends what kind of shop or restaurant it was. What I think I mean is I don't want the website to just be plain information, 'about us' 'where to find us' 'history' etc. I want it to be fun, interesting and have some kind of user input.

Toilet?
The first idea that sprang to my mind was a public toilet, in a nightclub or something. I don't know why. Maybe it's a bit stupid, my boyfriend certainly gave me a funny look when I told him the idea... But I was thinking about those sites that post pictures of people in nightclubs, like tilllate.com, and maybe the same concept could apply to the toilets in the club? It would be more interesting if taking pictures of random people didn't require their consent, as I'm sure you could get some funny stuff, expecially towards the end of the night. Haha.

Byron's Grave
Lord Byron is buried in my hometown of Hucknall, and it's always been a bit of a shrine to me and my friends. I would love to make some kind of tribute to this in website form but I'm not sure I could do much without just going into the history of the poet, which is nothing original.

Other than that I don't know at the moment. I'm really quite hung up on that toilet idea...

Crappy Cat!

http://www.crappycat.com/

Go here! I love it! You should too!

Three Examples of Design with User Input

Odosketch

Odosketch is a free-to-use website from design agency Odopod that allows the user to draw anything they like and submit it to a gallery. The drawing process is recorded, so the viewer can see exactly how the artist got from a blank canvas to a finished piece of work. The interface is very easy to use as it only has the one function, which is accessed by pressing the button on the homepage which says 'Create a Sketch'. Browsing other people's sketches is also easy as there are some displayed on the home page with options to look at more. The website is also very nicely designed, using a light colour scheme with pastel colours and cute images. Personally I really like this site, both in content and design, and will probably use it myself now I know about it.

Nigella.com/recipe

Aside from being chef Nigella Lawson's personal website, this site has a rather good recipe section that allows users to share and review recipes. There are lots of recipe sharing site on the web now but I think this one has a more attractive design than most. Users can search or browse for recipes in a few ways; by clicking 'inspire me' to get a random recipe, picking a category such as indulgent or romantic, or by simply searching using keywords. I believe there is one annoying issue with the navigation on the site, when displaying the list of recipes. When the list comes up it has links to pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 then Next 5, so you have to click this to get links to page 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. I think this is unnecessary and just plain annoying. The colour scheme for the site is simple and attractive, using white and orange for the recipe section of the site. Each section has a different colour representing it, forum being brown, book being blue etc. Overall it's a clean-looking attractive site that is easy to use.

Gumtree

Gumtree is a classified ads site that has a homepage for different cities across the country. It's free to use and has lots of different areas to post ads in; jobs, flats and houses, stuff for sale etc. I use this website quite a lot to find things in my local area and as a user I find it simple and easy to use. This is vital in a website like this, as it is designed to be used by anyone and everyone. The design is simple using mostly text and not many images, though I find it more attractive than the site craigslist.org, another classified ads site. I think this helps towards the usability of the site, as when I saw craigslist.org I found the wall of text quite intimidating at first glance.

JavaScript

Here are some of the JavaScript programs we've been working on.

Adding VAT to an Amount
<script language='JavaScript'>
a=parseFloat(prompt('Enter cost',0)); // ask user for amount to add vat to
cost=a; // set variable cost to the amount entered by user for a
vat=cost*17.5/100; // set variable vat to the amount of cost multiplied by 17.5 and divided by 100
document.write('£',cost,'+VAT at 17.5% =','£',cost+vat); // write sum of cost and vat to screen
</script>

Adding Numbers
<script language='JavaScript>
a=parseFloat(prompt('Number to start from?',0)); // ask user for number to start adding from
b=parseFloat(prompt('Number to stop at?',0)); // ask user for number to stop adding to
count=a; // set variable count to amount set by user in a
sum=0; // set variable sum to zero
while (count<b) { // while count is less than the amount the user entered for b do the following
count=count+1; // add one to the amount of count
sum=sum+count; // add the amount of count to the amount of sum
}
document.write(sum); // write amount of sum to screen
</script>

Creating a Slash made of d's
<script language='JavaScript'>
a=parseFloat(prompt('How many rows?',0)); // ask for user to input number of rows
row=0; // set variable row to zero
while (row<a) { // while row is less than the number inputted by the user for a do the following
space=0; // set variable space to zero
while (space<row) { // while space is less than zero do the following
document.write(" "); // write a space to the screen that the browser will not ignore
space=space+1; // add one to the amount of space
}
document.write("d<br>"); // write the letter d to the scren
space=0; // set variable space to zero
row=row+1; // add one to the amount of rows
}
</script>

Second Year

I haven't written anything in here since I started my second year, which is pretty shameful as its been two weeks now. My excuse is swine flu. Or flu at least. Anyway, I think it's going well so far, I'm enjoying the IM Pathway and am looking forward to starting my projects. I even quite like doing the JavaScript, which seemed rather scary to me at first. I've been thinking about ideas for the first project but I'll talk about that soon.

I like this

Most people may have seen this, but if you haven't you should!