Beginner design concept, art style, etc, for website

Digital Me - Design Asthetic thoughts

More brainstorming.

Color Scheme / Design ideals

- Looking at various portfolios and such online as well as general design themes.


http://www.vilepickle.com/

http://www.artviper.net/web-design-portfolio/3d-design-portfolio.php


Requirements:
Clear
Lots of space for media
Look professional (but prefably humble, too)
Simple navigation.
Width ~980
Display on all web browsers
Use style sheets

Digital Me - Initial Design Thoughts

Brainstorming ideas here. Don't mind me.

1/2/3 Columns -

1 column -

+ More space for content with galleries
+ Simpler layout, scroll up or down.
+ More easy to lead the eye of the audience.
+ Room for more design on sidebars, unlikely to squash site content.
- Harder to seperate information
- Mostly forces navigation bar to be across the top of the page
- Makes perhaps too much use of empty space.

 2 column -

+ Allows content to be seperated into seperate parts, eg. Images on one side, notes and comments on image on other.
+ Can be used for a navigation sidebar
- Content can seem disconnected
- More compacted content

3 Column -

+ Lots of space for different content.
+ Space for both a navigation bar and extra content.
- Heavily compacted content


I personally think the single-column design would be favourable, considering that the sight will contain a lot of media. The other columns severely restrict how much space can be available for an image. and therefore will make displaying content more difficult.

eXistenZ-ial thReshOldZ

Having missed the first session, I've found the work assignment on NOW and the film on YouTube. I watched through it, and noted down some of the most glaring flaws, amongst the threshold concepts it attempts (and sometimes fails) to pass through.

Based on the ending, I begin to assume that eXistenZ is either well-written, or badly-written, and if the question of that is raised, it is almost always the second option. A film that for 90% of the playtime seems to be badly-written, illogical, and unbelievable that in the final 10 minutes sort-of explains all these flaws and inconsistencies by a plot twist, is still a movie that for the vast majority was bad.

If I wanted to try and give it credit, I'd suggest that maybe the point the writers were attempting to make was that, by noticing all the inconsistencies and difficulty in crossing thresholds, the viewer might roughly guess at what the ending would reveal, thus freeing themselves from 'eXistenZ' in the way the characters couldn't.

An idea with potential, but the execution of it just came across as a film that appeared illogical and inconsistent. If the objective was to write a film that broke the immersion of the viewer to make them believe it was in fact unreal, it succeeds at the first part, but for me, fails at the second and just makes it seem like a badly-written, illogical, and immersion-breaking film. Introducing themes of doubt and questioning earlier on would have made it much more possible for the viewer to take the mental jump to the conclusion that this might not be reality.

I made a small list of things I found it possible to believe and those I didn't, or had extreme difficulty.

Believable Thresholds

• Virtual-reality through blobbish things - This is alright. The Matrix did something similar but not quite so obscure.
• Gristle-guns - I struggled, but I made it through. If lizards can be genetically bred to be spinal-column-interfacing control pads, then heck, they might as well be able to be guns, too.
• Mutant lizards in the first place - Why have they mutated? It's never really explained, but it's the future, so I substitute any of the various reasons for mutation, deciding to settle with it being an accidental by-product of the gene-alteration being done on lizards. Makes enough sense. I just wish less time had been spent watching people fondle them or turning them inside out.
• Everything within the explained video-game world. It was a video game, that was our explanation. However, since this was toted in the introduction session as being incredibly advanced, and is mentioned as being 'five years of passionate work' with millions of dollars in it, I'm slightly confused as to how all the non-player characters seem to be mindless automatons that need certain phrases saying to them to progress the 'games' plot. Considering even Fallout 1, released two years before this movie, allowed the player to actually type questions to certain NPC's and have them react based on keywords in the text, it seems odd that in the future, we've actually regressed to single-option choices in terms of interaction. So believability of the gameworld passes, but the apparent laziness in the design of conversations and structure has more trouble.
• The Cult of Reality : Okay, but I wish they'd had more explanation. As one of the most interesting parts of this film, they didn't seem to have much representation beyond using fish-bone-guns and hating the games. Why? Who leads them? What caused the hate? This is interesting but ignored.

Unbelievable Thresholds (when not considering the ending, which the audience cannot)

• Alegra's Mary Sue - A Social Recluse who somehow has perfect hair, common sense, and no problems with human interaction unless it's within the games that she apparently spends her entire life on. She also, apparently, is sexually fustrated or a deviant, based on the innuendo she constantly spouts.
• 'Copies? Oh, bugger....' - It is proven in the story that making a copy of a game is an easy enough task, based on what the thick-accented balding man says about copying the entire unit's memory core in his effort to steal the game. If this is the case, why is there not a hundred copies in the original building, five in a safe, and one in another safe in another state? They have the funding to do so, clearly, and it would even be believable enough to say that the other copies were destroyed or corrupt rather than just nonexistent, especially considering how fragile the content apparently was.
• Where did the money go? - Apparently Alegra is the only producer of the game which is worth tens of millions. By extension, she is worth tens of millions to the company. Why, then, is she freely available in a room with a total of one unarmed security guard who's on loan from their PR department, to the point where a character was able to draw a gun, stand, walk slowly to the front of the room, raise it, proclaim her a demoness and his quite strong opinion that she'd be better off dead, fire a shot into her, pause, and finally shoot another man before he's taken down?
• Bio-ports don't get infected! I mean mouths don't! - This entire explanation bridges over a massive leap in logic and realism with weak, damp paper. Mostly it marked the point where I stopped taking the film seriously. Since every other entrance to the body has a clear defensive mechanism such as mucus, saliva, tears, stomach acid, etc, the explanation made no sense. If this had been a turning point at which the security guard openly questions the logic of this, but is again shrugged off by Alegra, the audience would have suddenly had reason to question the reality of this world, and hang onto the plot more tightly. Furthermore, how can a bioport be 'removed'? Short of some way of healing the thing up instantly, a hole in the spinal column can't just be removed. Some explanation here might have helped.

For the most part, it seemed the film was pretending throughout to make no sense, only to finally remove the wool from our eyes at the very end and laugh as everything was quickly and clumisily explained.

As an audience I was left with raised eyebrows and the feeling that any concern I had for the characters or their fates had died along with them (several times).Too many leaps of blind belief are expected to be made without explanation or the focus they needed to be significant parts of the story.

The audience needed to be kept in closer touch with the plot to not be sent reeling off into confusion, as I felt the script was written with the ending already in-mind, but not making any sense until it. If the script was written without the assumed knowledge, the concept could have really pulled through and made sense. As it was, it was just not believable.