The tutorial for this week has been held over until next weekend. I’ve been hard at it this past week or so getting my latest assignment work completed and ready to be handed in this evening. This one involved planning all aspects of a website (the next assignment will see the website completed.) Now I’ve been building websites for quite a few years, in fact do it for a living, so my teacher thought I needed a challenge. She suggested that I experiment and do something I had not done before. Hmm, not as easy as it sounds.

So in keeping with my rather loose theme of graphics, art and computers I thought I might share some of the challenges I faced completing the assignment so far.

Rather than work indoors and risk a case of Ricketts, my cat Molly and I are sharing the swinging chair on the shaded back porch listening to the wind chimes tinkle, the fountain in the fishpond gurgle and the birds in the shrubbery burble. I have a cup of bitter-sweet coffee to hand and my laptop. The sun, not yet achieving the harshness of summer is making the garden glow as we rock gently back and forth.

Molly and I have just arrived home after a morning at the vet where she had her annual grease and oil change. She put up with the indignity with relatively good grace. I was amused to learn that rather than losing weight since her last visit, as I feared, she had gained it and was now a hefty 5.8 kilos. She is by no means a small cat, not fat but neither would you call her lithe. More fur than feline and shedding handfuls per stroke.

This is Molly in pussycat Nirvana lapping up the zzzz’s.

The website I am developing is for an artist friend Judith Timmins (Timmy). Twenty years ago she stepped out from between parked cars into the embrace of a vehicle travelling rather faster than it should have been. Her former life as a teacher came to an abrupt end because head injuries among other things reset her body clock and virtually obliterated her short-term memory.

She stills draws, but what once came easily now frustrates her. The spark that sustained her is trying to get out but sometimes loses the way. Thatch and I’ve always loved her work and have a number of pieces framed and some still to be. We’ve tried to be supportive over the years and talked about getting her art out to a larger audience. This is one way I can help.

Below is a picture that Timmy drew for me when I slipped down some stairs and sprained my ankle badly about two years ago. She professes not to care for fairies.

Timmy duly delivered her portfolio and I selected twenty pieces initially, to showcase a variety of styles and covering material from the 70’s to the present. Not an easy task because there are many outstanding pieces to choose from. This is the first stage as I want to add more art and other content later.

These then I scanned and the larger pieces I photographed. Timmy supplied some extra artwork for the website and a short biography. I toyed with designs that took into account how much Timmy dislikes squares and boxes, sussed out how to make it work and still be standards compliant and search engine friendly.

I did not use the artwork that Timmy supplied because her name was too small. I wanted to make her name prominent – along the lines of other artist websites that I looked at as part of my research (see previous entries for some of these.)

What the heck, here is another of my favourite pieces. I can’t recall why Timmy gave me this one but I’m glad she did.

The design I settled on is simple, but to make the layout work on a webpage is complex. First I needed to make thumbnail sized copies of all 20 pictures. I laid out the design in Adobe Illustrator and imported into Photoshop (PS) one of the vector shapes that acted as thumbnail placeholders to use as a template for sizing the graphics. The handy automate feature in PS made the task quick and painless.

I saved the thumbnails as TIFFs and imported them back into Illustrator. Imagine my chagrin when these were transparent in PS but not in Illustrator although they fitted beautifully.

Next, back in PS I repeated the process and saved them as GIFs as I knew this is a format that supports transparency. Back into Illustrator and yep they were transparent but they no longer fitted and I had to rescale them using the scale menu in Illustrator to make them all 12.5% of the original. By this you have an indication of how expert I am with this program – not. I’ve owned it for some years but rarely used it, preferring PS, until recently.

Right, my layout was complete and ready for printing. On my first attempt, Illustrator delivered a beautifully and readably rendered, in glorious colour image that took up about a 10th of the A4 page. “Hmmm”, I thought. “It’s not really suitable for my purposes. Need it bigger”. Tried again and this time the size was right but it only printed out part of the whole image, again about a 10th of the page. I had printed successfully in Illustrator before …grrrr.

“PS to the rescue!” I thought. I’d saved my layout in EPS format as per instructions from the assignment brief, imported it into PS and goggled when I saw the result. Bits of it were transparent and other not, there were lines all over the place that I had not put there. “Oh bother” I said or words to that effect, “I’ve missed something”. I then checked all the graphics to make sure they were all transparent and of course they were (in PS).

Next a quick troll through the Illustrator help files which was not at all enlightening. I then grouped all the objects and layers in Illustrator together, copied them to the clipboard and pasted them into a new PS file.

This is the layout that I came up with for Timmy’s website. The graphic in the centre comes from a sketchbook that Timmy discarded and I salvaged around 28 years ago.

This worked and I was able to print my layout In hindsight I realise that the problem was one other TIFF that I had not converted to GIF format. You learn something new every day and this exercise proves the adage. As Goldilocks (sometimes known in this household as Roger Daltry) once put it, “I won’t get fooled again.” TIFF’s are not a transparency supportive format. Use GIF or PNG. Oh and read the manual.

If you’ve made it this far we come to the pay-off. Let’s begin with this one:

Alison Stones has taken a swag of photos of the detail inside and out of Chartres Cathedral, better known as Notre Dame. “This website provides access to a comprehensive collection of images and detailed descriptions of Chartres Cathedral”

All images in these projects are curtesy of Alison Stones.

And while we are on this theme step over to the manuscript section and there are two:
Pontifical of Chartres

And the Martyrology and Obituary of Chartes

Then move on to “The Benedictine abbey church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay in Burgundy France is one of the most important surviving monuments of architecture and sculpture of the Romanesque period.”

You can of course only see one elephant and it is not a flying pig as Thatch suggested.

Finally: Images of medieval art and architecture

All sites load relatively quickly but prepare to wait around for the large versions of the pictures, they suck bandwidth and time.

That’s it for another week (okay a few days) and I promise the next vector tutorial will be forthcoming then.

Logging off,
Jools