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Adding life to your designs does not
necessarily mean using animated GIFs or
dynamic HTML. Master the dynamic power of
static objects and learn to direct the
user's eye through your pages for a seamless
experience
Design compositions is a complex and
challenging topic. You may think computer
animation is all there is to it, but this
concept is in fact much more versatile. This
time I will focus on a not so showy, but
very important aspect of perceived
dynamism in the "still life" of elements
that do not resort to explicit animation or
interactivity.
Yes, static
photos, text, and even geometric primitives
may carry a strong implication of movement,
both by themselves and in the context of
other elements. An ability to recognize
these implied motions, adjust and organize
their directions and forces is an essential
prerequisite for professional design. As for
animation proper and its use in multimedia
and Web design.
Motion can be
thought of as a direct opposite of balance.
A moving object, be it an explicitly moving
cartoon character in an animated banner or
an implicitly moving (but actually static)
photo of a jumping athlete, makes us feel
that not only this element is about to be
repositioned, but also that the entire
composition is about to go from one state to
another.
This
instability, when obvious, adds a unique
dynamic flavor to a design. However,
"dynamic" not always means "unstable";
hardly any composition can be successful
without subtle yet important bits of motion
spread over the page. Only a perfectly
symmetric figure, such as a circle taken in
isolation, can be said to be absolutely
motionless - and, as a result, lifeless and
dull.
The article starts
with a discussion of design elements capable
of adding
realistic
dynamism to a composition, such as photos or
artwork depicting objects in motion. Much
more important, however, is
abstract
dynamism of common geometric shapes, of
which perhaps the most important is a
straight line.
Another aspect is how elements interact to
create dynamic
eye flows,
and the
big picture
of dynamism in the composition.
The idea
of purely logical markup and separating
content from presentation may sound simple
and promising---until you ask yourself, what
to do with the huge pile of existing HTML
material? Can it be painlessly adopted to
XML syntax and, more importantly, to XML's
ideology of generalized markup? Read on for
some practical answers to these questions...
To summarize, here are the main
rules to be observed in
modular HTML:
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There should be as few module types as
possible, and once the site design is more
or less settled down, introducing a new
module type must be an exception
justifiable only by emerging an
essentially new type of content which
wouldn't fit into old templates.
-
Instances of the same module must be
identical verbatim except for
insertions of variable content (for
example, heading text in a heading
module).
-
There shouldn't be
any "orphan" tags left outside the
modules, except for a minimum tag set
needed for marking up plain text (e.g.
<P>,
<STRONG>, and
<EM> tags).
-
Each module type must be marked by its
corresponding comment label in order to
facilitate identifying the module type
both in manual editing and in automatic
processing.
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