Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Authoring Tools

In the days when Hypercard was the only authoring tool around, we got used to the idea of presenting information ‘one screen at a time’. Hypercard, like other authoring tools that followed needed a metaphor to help us think of screens of information.  Hypercard used the card metaphor. A bunch of cards was called a stack. So we thought in terms of a pile of cards and we presented them one after the other.

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Thursday, October 02, 2003

Montage / Collage

The words montage and collage seem to be used frequently to describe the same thing. I certainly find myself using the terms interchangeably. The definitions found on dictionary.com are thus:

Collage: An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.

Montage: A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.

It seems that montage is more often applied to 'superimposing', whereas collage seems to apply to 'pasting over'.

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Saturday, July 19, 2003

The Pleasures of Pantone

When the Pantone colour system was invented in 1962 and developed into the business it is today by Lawrence Herbert, the word ‘web’ was associated with ‘web offset’ printing; printing on a continuous roll of paper. The word ‘web’ now is more readily related to the Internet and there is a relationship between web design and Pantone.

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Saturday, June 14, 2003

Enhanced PDF

First time users of Adobe Acrobat don’t think of it as a ‘multimedia authoring’ tool, because, open it up and nothing appears! No blank page on which draw or create is presented. No tool bar with objects to be dragged onto the screen is available.

To use Acrobat, a PDF needs to be created in some other application first. Could be Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator, or, my preference, InDesign.

Once we have the PDF, what can we do beyond basic ‘page turning’?

Acrobat can easily deliver multiple page PDF documents with its built-in forward, backwards, and return icons. The PDF format, however, can be enhanced to include much more:

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Sunday, June 01, 2003

Test Rig

I’m sure you’ll agree - test your web site in as many browsers as you can. How far back you go is another question; Netscape 4 is a particularly tricky browser to support.

But how do you keep a range of browsers to hand so that you can open up your pesky URL and see what others might see? Do you need to maintain a museum of browsers on different platforms? I have a couple of treasured museum pieces (a MAC Classic and a PC486) but I rarely fire them up!

So what do I do? I use Virtual PC.

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