Perception…
From the beginning of mankind up to our present time, the human being has founded civilizations owing to his intelligence. In general terms, intelligence is the faculty of adapting oneself to the surrounding environment. Contrary to nature, the Internet is not intended to create a mind for the environment but is a cyber protocol developed to create an environment for the mind.
The Internet is not a virtual media where computers linked to each other by cables communicate through the TCP/IP protocol. The Internet is the greatest cyber intelligence ever created in history where the world’s greatest minds communicate…
Pre-loader…
The power of interaction resulting from the nature of the Internet creates ties between itself and the channels already formed in the context of the renewal of concepts. The best way to define these ties is the word “convergence” which belongs to scientific terminology. Starting from the computer, the creation of the Internet has reshaped all existing concepts towards itself. This can be observed in many fields beginning from the communication medium that is your computer to the personal digital diary that is your mobile phone, even in subjects beyond technological phenomena like sociology and literature.
The grounds in the world where we most notice this change especially comprise concepts closely related to technology. The foremost ones among these are advertising, the cinema and the television which have become big industries. Of course, these industries’ “driven forces” have always been the design and creation. This is the reason why the easiest way to understand the recent criteria of design is through understanding the amount of change which has occurred in these major concepts due to the Internet.
When taking a look at the recent culture of the cinema, our attention is immediately drawn to the fact that the Japanese art of manga takes an important place. In fact, despite a different philosophical background, even Fight Club is one of the important reflections of this culture on the processing and structural levels. Indeed, at the head of this stand the cult films of the cinema culture with Matrix taking the lead.
Matrix possessed a structure which was formed by the last century’s most outstanding world cinemas united to the cyber culture. This structure stands as a real perception point particularly for an individual who is part of the cyber culture. The cult philosophy developed through Pi and expanded with Ghost in the Shell formed the visual narrating structure of Matrix.
In order to understand the influence of the Internet on the television culture, we need to focus on the MTV group which is one of the most developed structures of the sector, forming its target mass from the youth who knows and appreciates the cyber culture. You will be amazed at how, in the last few years, the criteria of design have been synthesized with the new taste formed by the difficulties of the Internet’s bandwidth.
Nevertheless, when observing from the advertising field, the affinity of the cyber culture to the ordinary advertisement criteria is so strong that it would cause movements within itself.
Interactive design
Goal:
Every formation that takes place on the Internet has a certain goal. This goal attributes a responsibility on every possible activity realized during the creation of a web site. Your goal attributes a meaning to your target mass whereas this latter guides you from the technology that you will be using to every content that will be present on your page.
When surfing on the Internet, you will notice that the web sites have been generally formed according to five main goals.
a) News
b) Query
1. Information transfer to database
2. Information transfer from database
c) Entertainment
d) Publicity
e) Communication
Before designing a web site, you should delimit with precise lines what the purpose of this site is and if necessary carry out this distinction by clearly dividing the site into two. If not, your visitors will not reach what they aspire to and your site will not have fulfilled its objective.
Each type of visitor has its own logic of perception. You cannot expect a site which has not been formed according to this logic to reach its aim.
A person having visited your site with an objective of information would like to obtain this information in the quickest and least elaborate way. However, an Internet user visiting your site for entertainment will desire objects which are pleasing to the eye and which can amuse him at certain intervals. These two visitors are definitely on a different line and are of opposite character.
Target mass:
Your site’s aim is to make you directly reach the social group you intend to address. This group is a kind of customer mass, which is necessary for you to reach the site’s objective. The portrait drawn within your objective is the target mass. People in this mass are linked to each other according to certain common goals by surfing on the web, following certain norms of behavior, having common desires and common tastes.
In this context, a good web site should meet the common needs of these users.
– What connects the members of this group to one another?
– Where do they meet?
– What would draw their attention among a pile of information and shapes?
All these questions have their answers and these answers form the foundation of our site.
Just as seems repulsive to you the cargo service coming to your door and singing a song before giving you the parcel, so is wrong and unlikable to receive with music a user linked to your site for information purposes.
The target mass which will be linked to your site also represents an important factor in the determination of the technologies you will have to use. If you are planning the presentation of a Unix-based program on your site, you must foresee that your users may use a text-based browser. Especially if you are an Internet service provider that distributed Netscape 2.0 to its users.
Before designing:
Web sites are created on a certain content. This content is the product you should first offer to the user visiting your page. However, one of the most important points forming the priority in a web site is the classification of this content. This classification process can be followed out according to updating periods. If the updating periods are close to each other, the separation should be carried out according to the target mass’ common perception points. The most important fact not to forget is that the Internet user is extremely impatient.
Once the information has been classified into certain sections, static or dynamic pages are formed according to the updating periods of the information. Static pages include information which is neither changed by time nor according to the user and its content is first of all limited to a presentation or a company information. Whereas dynamic pages change their content even though they do not vary their forms.
The use of certain formations within a web site’s pages binds this site together. These phenomena spread out into sections such as the logo, the choice of color and the common layout. If the site you are trying to create belongs to a company then a logo which has been realized according to certain norms will be of greatest help for you. A well-planned logo follows the same objective as its web site. It will communicate to you the criteria needed to use in your site by choice of color and formation of shapes. Apart from this, placing the elements that repeat themselves among the pages on certain locations will connect your pages to each other.
One of the most important points which should be taken care of during the design process is your possibility of finding room on your site’s layout for pages which show a geometric increase subsequently to the formation. During the design, you should foresee the points to which this extension will take place and leave these open. You must even forecast the need of record after a certain period for an electronic magazine and take into account this archiving option even during the formation of the site.
Design
During the design process of your site, your main goal should be to arouse an online feeling on people. Thanks to this, the visitor will be pleased with your pages. It is not difficult to create this feeling on dynamic pages but, for static pages, you must use technologies you believe will be able to give this feeling besides html and technologies which are commonly used.
During the formation, you should also pay attention to general optimization techniques among which stands the palette first of all. If not, you will put the user off for nothing.
The Internet user prefers pages which respond to him in the quickest time. In this purpose, be very careful that your pages (at least your home page) can be quickly loaded.
Up to now, the web and the Internet were elements existing together with the computer. This is why you may not know whether an Internet user is short-sighted or long-sighted but there are two points on which you have precise information.
1- Unless he possesses very different products- which can rarely be the case- an Internet user is in a seated position.
2- There is a great chance he is looking at the screen.
These two simple considerations can lead us to interesting matters. Let’s start examining the questions straight away if you like. Let’s first ask ourselves how the fact the user is sitting will influence our graphic design. Of course, the best way to solve this is to begin by understanding that the sitting position is actually an artificial movement for the human nature and how much a seated person is, in fact, uncomfortable. This inconvenience makes the Internet user ill at ease, bad-tempered and, most important of all, impatient. And when Internet lines suffer technological insufficiencies, then one finds such a site totally inadequate according to the visual materials which can really be used, printed matter or any kind of medium. Success lies in creating harmony and order even within these technical insufficiencies. Actually, anyone who understands the Internet theory can easily realise this. The first rule you need to know is that no television user will think his broadcast is of bad quality when watching it on a bad television, however an Internet user is an authority in this matter. As soon as he gets linked to the Internet, he bitterly criticizes any type of image which appears and declares he can do better. There is no way to eliminate this idea. Therefore, a web master and a web designer should always stay patient towards funny ideas and sharp criticisms and should not doubt about their ideas.
If we leave this social element aside, we will understand that the first rule which should be taken into consideration during the conception of an Internet graphic is the slowness of the lines. This is the greatest problem regarding the Internet. The Internet traffic consists of packets. Between the server and the client, these packets are of 700 bytes with a modem link and 1024 bytes with a leased line or a cable system. Consequently, even for small pictures like those of 10kb, there is data traffic of around 10-15 packets. When faulty packets and error control systems are included in these then the number of packets can reach 20 to 30. That’s why the foremost method of accelerating the picture’s transfer is to reduce the file size. A web page should not exceed 30-40 kilobytes including its html code. Any information surpassing this will make the user grow impatient. If the picture you have in hand is bigger than required then dividing it into pieces and joining these together under html code would be the right thing to do. The location on the server of every picture should be written into the picture’s html code. This is not a necessity, it is a must. If not, the picture can absolutely not be visualised. Besides, a client seeing a picture under a html code will ask the server how much space the picture takes on the screen. After taking a look at the picture, the server will give information concerning the screen width. If the space occupied by the picture on the screen is noted inside the html code then any such dialogue realized for every picture will be avoided. If you inscribe a dimension other than the one related to your picture in your web page code, you would notice that, according to this information, the picture would be re-rendered by the client’s browser. However practical this method may seem, it is quite wrong. Pictures appearing in this manner comprise distortions on a great scale.
Shaping the picture we possess according to the web standards is a process which includes hundreds of tricks. The most important subject, apart from the file size, which should be taken care of is the format chosen for the picture. Web browsers support many various types of picture formats. The most common among these and the ones used by all browsers are GIF and JPEG. These two formats have very different compression methods. Pictures of JPEG formats have a high compression capacity. The use of a JPEG format is, thus, particularly appropriate for visual material containing a wide palette information such as photographs. Whereas concepts containing a palette information of under 216 colours such as graphics require the use of a GIF format.
If the visual material is a graphic, as buttons and all visual elements helping the web work are, then a GIF format must be used. The most important point on which to pay attention concerning the palette is that 256 colours should be used for the browser to render much faster these types of pictures. However, Netscape browsers have allocated 40 colours out of this colour information system for their own logo visualisations. This leaves us 216 colours. The colours therefore require to be taken by a palette used by the system. For this reason, do the colours need to be chosen by a web safe palette especially in graphical programs. The narration of these types of functional graphics is insufficient. The easiest way to strengthen their narration is to support the graphic with texts. In this case, font skills become included to the graphical information. Your choice of font will change according to the perception rate of the target mass. But the most important fact to keep in mind when choosing the font size is that, if you need to use a font of small size, then quotation marked typefaces are required. In the meantime, if you are using small sized fonts then using an anti-aliased would be good. Thanks to this the perception of small sized fonts will be easier.
If your picture palette contains many colours, realizing a JPEG format would be useful. In this instance, it would be helpful to combine the palette’s colours which are close to each other. There are optimisation programs which carry out this process. The size of the picture increases if there are many colours. You can yourself realize these kinds of pictures without using optimisation programs. The first method is by colouring the picture. If you don’t have a program which does this, my advise would be for you to arrange a layer of your desired percentage rate on the picture. When you later combine the two layers –which is necessary for GIF and JPEG- you will observe that your colour palette consists of colours close to each other.
Diminishing the colour rates will also be possible this way.
As a final matter, let’s take a closer look at the second subject we mentioned at the beginning of our article concerning the position of the Internet user. The user sitting in front of the monitor will use, up to a certain extent, the same perception system as a TV watcher. The TV is given as an example because standards in TV broadcasting consist of various shapes. Actually, the choice of colours varies according to the publishing and broadcasting mediums. In medias printed on certain materials such as paper or photographs, the use of the lightest colour possible of the paper in that media and the addition of this colour to all the other colours applied on it, require the use of unsaturated colours in these types of medias. As the colour can be manipulated easily in monitor-based medias, no problem can occur. In that case, the light behind the colour and the general surrounding light rate are important. In order not to create a contrast for the eye, the most logical palette to use would consist of saturated colours. This will give the onlooker a greater feeling of confidence.
To summarize as a conclusion, the general aim in the creation of a web site is to: Select the target mass from the Internet user’s pool, direct it to the created web site, transfer the desired information and redirect this back to the Internet environment.
