Dayn W Creative

I was listening to the boagworld podcast today, and they brought up an interesting point in response to a listener question. The listener was a web designer concerned with the number of elements his client was adding to the home page. The common belief is that the home page is the most important page of any site. As such, it should be no surprise in the thinking that if it’s important, it belongs on the home page.

These days we are finding our information via search engines which deep link to pages within a site, bypassing the home page altoghether. A lot of effort and money is spent on SEO which is only working to encourage this process. So, home page placement isn’t as paramount as we once thought.

Back to the crowding issue. As designers, we have been taught about the importance of white space in web design. So, to restate the listener’s concern, how are we to explain that not everything important belongs on the home page?

The answer is beautifuly simple, as most good answers are.

For every element added to a page, a bit of importance is deducted from all other items on that page. See? Beautiful. After adding important element after important element, we are left with a overall page of unimportance.

You can easily imagine which is more effective, a page of 30 elements screaming for attention, or a page of 3. Eventually, too many elements on a page forces the user into that frantic, scanning-for-something relevant case Steven Krug talks about in “Don’t Make Me Think“.

Now, we have a justification for white space, other than the fact that it just looks better.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Here’s a peek at a couple Jumbo Tron commercials we did for Rhino Lacrosse. These played at every home game of the Portland Lumberjax at the Rose Garden Arena.

We teamed up with Resonance Productions to produce these spots end to end for 2006 NLL MVP Ryan Powell of Rhino Lacrosse and the Jax. I personally handled the motion graphics and music editing.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Okay, so this image is more than a little doctored, but it was enough to make me read the entire story. The short of it is that scientists have been able to bend light around an object and, in a sense, make it invisible. The rub is that so far, it only works for a single wavelength, ie microwave or laser light. So, until the entire visible spectrum can be bent, this technology will most likely be useful for cloaking objects from other technologies like radar and night-vision.

But look how cool that image is! Someone went for it with the the clone tool and or shot a plate to composite two images together. One with our invisible hoodie guy, and one without. Either way, I think this is a great use of compositing where the final product looks so much like a hap-hazzard snapshot, it adds instant intrigue.

Popularity: 13% [?]