The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.
ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Yes it doesn’t look much but it’s reasonably smooth animation with collision detection running in JavaScript. Hats off to the Swedish programmer (I guess) Bjoern Lindberg.
The controls are simple just g to toggle gravity, h to split blobs and j to join them. You can use cursor keys to move them or drag them with the mouse. Very neat demo.
Popularity: 13% [?]
The point and click puzzle genre has grown out of nowhere over the last few years and there are lots of them around. The idea is that each screen is a visual puzzle. When you click on part of the screen something happens. You have to figure out the ordering and solve that screen.
Where they vary is the degree of animation, sounds etc and the difficulty of the puzzles. The Grow puzzles are more logical while in Curious you have to help the main character escape each screen. This is guaranteed to keep you puzzling for quite a while!
Popularity: 15% [?]
Sometimes you need Post-It notes. And if you want to have a little fun, you can easily create them online using this generator.
Then you could be really sad by printing it out on a colour printer, cutting it out and super-gluing it to someone’s computer! Prank #1928 from “the Boys Book of really nasty pranks”. Just imagine the look on their face when they try to remove it! Won’t you be popular!!
Popularity: 16% [?]
This site is apparently 27,282.45 cm long (except it’s stretched vertically not width wise). I’ve snipped three pages into one to give you an idea of what it looks like. It takes a while to download and then scroll down.
Like Mr Wong’s Soup apartments I imagine it must be a very expensive site for all the graphics that are downloaded. That’s the price of art!
Anyone can upload a section and add a link to themselves free. It has to be 300 pixels width, 700 pixels height at a resolution of 72 dpi and the the visual must be your inspiration, with a file size maximum 75 K.
Popularity: 10% [?]
The image above is in two halfs- the Starry night image on the left which is made up of 210,000 tiny photos. You can see a 3 x 3 zoom right in on the right.
The full image is 1.5 Billion pixels (Ie GigaPixel). On the linked site you can zoom in or out to your hearts content. A fabulous piece of work- both the original, and this Flash viewable GigaPixel image.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Logos fascinate me- the way that a compact graphic image can project a company’s essence and being. Over time logos get redesigned to reflect changes and not always for the best.
This site looks at 20 logos and gives them praise … or not! Excellent stuff.
Popularity: 19% [?]
This picture is 15,941 by 261 pixels in size. Scaled down and split into three chunks gives you an idea of the size.
It’s well done but isn’t exactly safe for work- some bits have a touch of nudity and baby making but as a piece of art it’s tremendous!
Popularity: 10% [?]
MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.
Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.
Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are - what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.
Warning - The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!
Popularity: 12% [?]
This is run by IBM, part of one of their research groups. It lets anyone upload data sets on anything at all and then display it using one of a number of visualisation methods such as statistical charts, maps, word trees or even tags. It’s completely free and anyone can use it. Nice looking website as well with tutorials on how to upload, and a blog.
The chart shown took 2005 data for the money earmarked by Federal Govt per state on a per capita basis. I.e. I’d guess it’s the total spent on each state divided by the number of inhabitants. Alaska came out well!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Web 2.0 is the title for the modern type websites (eg Google Maps) that use modern web technology, including advanced JavaScript to update web pages without redrawing the entire page.
Many of these sites have logos that look similar in their style, so it’s not surprising that Web 2.0 Logo generators have started to appear. That said, this is a pretty good one with 5 different looks, such as the Google look that I used.
Popularity: 6% [?]
This is simple but unless you really know the USA and exactly where all the states are located, it’s not that easy.
Just drag a piece to where you think it should go. It tallies up your score and shows you where it should have gone if you get it wrong.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Macromedia, now Adobe Flash is now ten years old. Almost as old as the Web itself. Flash is one of those technologies that has shaped our Web experience, from animated adverts through games and an era of skippable (and sometimes non skippable) website intros. Adobe have recognised the impact that Flash has had and is not letting it past unnoticed.
Over the next few days you can vote for what you think is the most influential Flash site from each year- this is a rolling vote with 1998’s winner chosen (Nrg’s Loops and Sound effects- shown), and it’s now on 1999 so if you’re feeling a bit retro…
Popularity: 3% [?]