The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1

Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.

Green, Tom. Digital Web Magazine (2006). Articles>Web Design>Video>Standards

Captions for Video with Flash CS3 (Part Two)

In this article, we’re going to look at a method of captioning a Flash video file: embedding the XML directly into the FLV file. In very simple terms, the XML document will contain the cue points for the captions. When one of those cue points is reached, the caption appears over the video.

Green, Tom. Digital Web Magazine (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Flash

Captions for Video with Flash CS3

In the exercise that follows, and in the second part of this series, we are going to add captions, using both methods, to the same video. For those passionate about web standards, the first method involves the use of Timed Text captions. If you go this route, you need to follow the standard laid out by the W3C. There is a lot to it but, in a nutshell, it requires you to create a specific type of XML document using the required tags.

Green, Tom. Digital Web Magazine (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Flash

Concept Design Tools

Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I’ll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts.

Lombardi, Victor. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Information Design>Methods

Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website

This article will explain some simple techniques which, if incorporated into the design of a website, will enhance its accessibility and usability for people who have a vision, hearing, physical, cognitive, or learning disability.

Tomlinson, Leona. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Usability

Cooking With Stock

It’s not a secret. We all use stock imagery in our day-to-day design work. So why doesn’t anybody ever talk about it? Just like the inventory of a grocery store, not everything you see on a stock photo site is an ingredient for a gourmet production. By far the worst mistake you can make when choosing stock is selecting stereotypical or clichéd images to convey a concept.My guess is that we’re all just a little ashamed. We want people to see our work as just that: ours. When you have to tell someone that you didn’t create that grungy texture, or you didn’t take that beautiful photo, it feels a lot like admitting that you’ve cheated on a test. But this is nonsense—as designers, it’s our job to put things together and deliver a composition that looks good.

Beaird, Jason. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design

Web Design by Designers

Designers are, as a rule, a fussy bunch, and when it comes to their own business communications they’re even more so. Designing a website for an award-winning design firm verges on the impossible. A design firm’s web presence primarily serves as a tool to attract new business from a global community—and, secondarily, as a means to show off. Designers are by far their own worst critics, and their websites have to tread a fine line between being cutting-edge so as to attract young new business, and more traditional so as to appeal to established or more conservative businesses.

Elam, Kimberly. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Business Communication>Assessment

Getting The Most Out Of Your Library

Think of the library system as something akin to the open-source movement before software. Subsidized institutions buy books, subscribe to journals and proprietary databases, and pay people to help you find “stuff”, all essentially at no cost to you.

Hicks, William. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Academic>Information Design

How Environments, Real And Virtual, Influence Us

A person’s home and the way he presents it are physical manifestations of his personality just as the design and content of a corporate website are virtual manifestations of a brand. Environments, both real and virtual, affect human perception and behavior.

Mueller, Kyle. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Environmental

eCRM: A Virtual Reality Check For Your Business

Virtual marketplaces bear little resemblance to brick-and-mortar enterprises. This is precisely why electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) is so crucial to online success.

Kohli, Tei. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management

Photoshop vs. Fireworks

Photoshop. Fireworks. If you’re a serious web designer (and not using the GIMP) you’re going to be using one or the other. But which is best?

Smith, Nathan. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop

Smart CSS Ain’t Always Sexy CSS

In the endless struggle to truly separate presentation from structure, have we lost our way? Are the old-school advocates for CSS still pushing radical and unnecessary thinking to try and justify the mass-adoption of a technology that has already been massively adopted? Smart CSS isn’t always sexy CSS… and lets face it, when working with real world applications, smart is where you want to be.

Ringlein, Martin. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS

Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web

Social networks as we know them—MySpace, Facebook, Twitter—each keep identity and personal relationships separate from one another. Every time you join a network, that information has to be duplicated, by hand, by you. It’s a familiar process, but in 2008 we have the tools to break that trend.

Ward, Ben. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Wireless Web>Social Networking

Integrating Social Media into a Web Content Strategy

Outside of the tech industry, skepticism and fear are the norm when it comes to social media. But it is simply about finding the best way to communicate with an audience. Social media consists of the same content already in use: text, audio, images, and video. The difference lies in its ability to open up new channels of communication.

Parrott, Britt. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Social Networking

The Education of Geeks and Freaks

if Post Secondary Educators don’t change their attitude towards you—and soon—you are going to find it really hard to find trained staff for your businesses.

Green, Tom. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Education>Technology>Multimedia

Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha

Internet startups are generally as successful as a nerd in a singles bar. Ventures that get off the ground rarely get knee-high. Why? You don’t need a deckful of scatter charts to do this, but you do need the willingness to make some difficult decisions now—and stick to them later.The biggest problem I’ve seen isn’t lack of talent, enthusiasm or even funding. It lies in skipping a critical early stage of development I call the “alpha-alpha” stage, or “alphalpha” for short.

Goldenberg, Dave. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Careers>Management>Project Management>Technology

Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey

Arguing for web standards and semantically clean and rich websites is an uphill battle. For years we had to deal with browsers that needed us to mess around with HTML just to display a document in several columns and the visual outcome was much more important than the structure.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations

Deep down below the layers of interface, CSS, HTML, and XML—down where only the geekiest among us roam—everything comes down to this: it’s all zeroes and ones. On or off. The digital switch Though interaction and conversion becomes a bit more complicated at the point the interface meets the visitor, though there are a few more shades of gray, in the end it comes down to the same thing: yes or no.

Ragle-Davis, Robin. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Audience Analysis

Efficient Video Delivery Over The Internet

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this day and age of digital media, video on your web site can be priceless. Whether you have a corporate, social networking, or video streaming site, video instantly captures your visitor’s attention and describes your product and services quickly and effectively. Due to its large install base, Flash video is now the de-facto standard in internet video delivery. With recent updates to Flash 9, Flash Player adds the capability of playing H264 encoded video in full screen mode, making the delivery of Flash videos on the internet not only practical, but efficient as well. In this article, I will examine a few different techniques for delivering Flash videos over the internet and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Zhu, Lei. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Streaming>Video

Improve Your Page Performance With Lazy Loading

The important things to address are page weight and load time. Both of these factors have a negative impact on the user, and we should be working towards minimizing it.

Heuser, Jakob. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>DHTML

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

Padilla, Mike. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Information Design

Introduction to Django: Helping Perfectionists With Deadlines

Django is an open-source Web framework, written in Python, that allows you to easily and rapidly develop interactive, data-centric web applications. It came into being when two Web developers—Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison—in Kansas, after moving their newspaper’s website from PHP to Python, found themselves repeatedly solving similar problems. They decided to extract the common functionality and released the resulting framework in 2005.

Ellis, Dan. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Software>Open Source

Web Design 101: Photoshop

Photoshop promises great power, but can be more than a little challenging when it comes to clarity and patience. New users can easily get frustrated at how daunting some of the challenges can be when it comes to getting the job done, and even those who are a bit more familiar with it still find points of frustration that impede both production and creativity. So for those who barely know Photoshop, but would like to become more familiar with it—find out what sort of things to look for when it comes to the palette system, layers, styles, effects, various tools, and saving or exporting their work—let’s look at the basics.

Peck, Anton. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Adobe Photoshop

Presenting: Preparation, Process, and Pizzazz

Never dive into creating your presentation without knowing the constraints within which you are working, as they can really alter how you present. When I started to prepare for my presentation, I had to ruthlessly narrow down what my goals for speaking were before I tackled the nitty gritty.

Alcantara, Lea. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Presentations

The Web Beyond the Desktop

For the viewer, time shifting has been a dramatic improvement over the traditional experience of watching TV. The web is about to experience as dramatic a shift in place for the user of a website, which will inevitably affect the way we design and develop web sites and applications in the future.

Shea, Dave. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Wireless Web