Equator Live

Mrs Taulbut my GCSE art teacher was always on my back for not leaving enough white on the paper. To begin with I didn’t quite get it until she went to work on my very grey sketch of  a bowl of fruit with the putty rubber. It only took about 30 seconds and the white space she claimed back from the page improved my sketch about 90%.

Next the careers advice got a couple of guys from the local art college to come in with a FedEx logo (they had a lot more than just that but it was a while ago and on a Tuesday morning so i forget) They asked if anyone could see an arrow in the logo, I clocked it right away to the frustration of my friends (it’s between the E and the x in case you’re struggling) After that i was hooked and a life in design was the only way for me.

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Posted on March 29th, 2011 in Design with 1 comment

There are now billions of internet users worldwide. Everyday hundreds of millions of these users access their social media profiles and share news, stories, pictures and videos.

That makes for an awful lot of data tearing around the ‘webosphere,’ and it can be difficult to make connections in this cacophony of content. But there are some clever people out there who can turn this data into engaging and even beautiful visuals that paint a picture of who we are, how we interact and what we care about. What’s more, this picture can be a living, breathing visual that evolves as new data is created, such as the animations featured below.
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Posted on March 24th, 2011 in Design, Marketing, Social Media with no comments

If Steve Jobs claims that the web needs to be cleaned of Flash this proprietary plague to justify Apple ‘control freak’ politics, it’s only fair to admit that the success of iPhones has modified the way we surf the web.

However considering its overall presence on the interweb, the lack of Flash support would have been a real handicap without any alternative. No need to say that HTML 5 kinda comes as a savior, being an open-standard supported by all the web actors. www.html5rocks.com helps us to see with more clarity the large possibilities the new version of HTML does already offer. Thanks Google!

Posted on March 24th, 2011 in Development with no comments

Everyone’s musical taste is a very personal thing and equally as personal is the way people find and listen to new music.

Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) was originally built to trawl the internet to find newly uploaded songs for users to rate and consequently create a chart of the most popular new music on the web. Now with its added functionality hype machine allows you to create your own personal music feed pulling in particular artists you like and music blogs that you enjoy. It’s a great way of finding new music by letting someone else do the hard work for you.

Posted on March 24th, 2011 in Fun with no comments

Another week, another challenge for the Equator walking group. This time they tackled Ben Ledi, situated on the southern edge of the Highlands, it can be seen from many parts of the southern Highlands in Scotland’s National Park.

The group climbed the 2800ft to the summit over a distance of 5 miles which took them around 4 hours. Yet again the weather was misty and cold at the top so views were minimal but the team got some lovely shots on lower ground and even made time to stop and chat to Hamish, the local highland cow.

Posted on March 22nd, 2011 in Fun with no comments

We know a good cause when we see one so on Friday we were busy raising money for Comic Relief. Not only did we hold a bake sale and sell red noses but we also held a cinema screening of the movie The Hangover.

So a big thanks goes to Laura D, Lauren, Olivia, Vicki and Vickie, Bryan, Jen, Emma and Pamela for baking cakes and all kinds of goodies, to Brent and Grant for the surround sound and technical set up and for food and drink and ideas and tidying up a thank you goes to Laura B, Nick, Duncan, Lauren and Laura D and Fiona. Jacqueline gets awarded for top red nose seller of the year who single-handedly sold 60 noses and a big thank you has to go to Lachlan who peeled 25 onions and made 4 fried onion variants. Last but not least a huge thanks goes to Kay who was chief organiser.

Overall we raised £387.31 plus £60 in noses. Well done everyone!

Posted on March 21st, 2011 in Fun with no comments

The Equator Walking Team set out this weekend to tackle Ben Venue. Taking 4 hours to climb up and back the team were hopeful to see the fantastic views of Loch Katrin but unfortunately the Scottish weather played up again.

Visibility was so poor that the team saw nothing of the beautiful views. But all was not lost, they had a fantastic time and as a consequence more of the Equator staff are joining up.

Posted on March 9th, 2011 in Fun with no comments

There is still a bit of a debate as whether there is a ‘fold’ on a web page. Will the user scroll to find more content or just look at what’s in front of them? Well, we believe they do, and because of that we’d like to show you a few sites we’ve found that actually use page scrolling as an interesting and beautiful feature. We’ve seen the effect used in three different ways, using JavaScript to control backgrounds, images and text to create an appealing way to explore the sites.

Site Navigation

Nike Better World and Campaign Monitor replicate the concept of site pages with sections of the vertical page. You can scroll down to each individual content section and see the images animate vertically at different rates creating a parallax scrolling effect. This creates a wonderful feeling of motion, making it a pleasure to explore the content, although scrolling with the scroll wheel can make it rather jumpy – it’s best viewed by clicking the navigation buttons.

Telling a story

On Ben the Bodyguard you are given a ‘Scroll’ call to action, then as you scroll down the page a story is revealed which eventually leads you to a call to action to provide your email address for updates. The story concept quickly draws you in, finally capturing your interest and making you eager to find out more.

Background decoration

Row to the pole uses a layered background effect, again using parallax scrolling, to make a more visually appealing page background. Using different scrolling rates for the page content, clouds and icebergs give a very lovely feeling of looking down at the page from the sky.

The scrolling effects on these examples easily enhance and enrich the user experience. Using an effect like this has to have a specific purpose though otherwise it could become a barrier to exploring the content within a site, rather than being an incentive to do so.

Posted on March 1st, 2011 in UX with no comments