How do I… Use Flash animation to duplicate the marquee tag effect?

Most Web designers and developers are glad that the marquee tag is dead and buried. However, if you have a boss or a client that is insistent upon using the marquee tag in a Web site, you do have an option that allows for a lot more control in the looks and functionality of a line of scrolling text. CSS can’t help us here unless you incorporate a rather knotty chunk of JavaScript, so I’ll show you how to create the marquee tag effect using animation and a few lines of ActionScript in Flash CS3.

The marquee tag is one of the more infamous HTML tags. It was a tag that was never fully supported by the W3C. As the name implies, text enclosed by the marquee tag scrolled from right to left when displayed in a Web browser. It was only supported by earlier versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and was incompatible with Netscape. However, IE7 will still display the tag, as will recent versions of Firefox and Safari.

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Home Business Web Designers Announced New Services – 3D web Design & 3D Animation

On its way of celebrating years of success in integrated web solutions, India-designers aims at entering and capturing the market of 3D animations as well.

India Designers, one of the leading website design and Development Company in India has recently announced its new services for its offshore customers. India Designers has recently added 3D graphics and animation design.

Getting employed expert 3-D Animators having expertise in offering unique identity to your corporate business, this leading web design company is ready to set a mark in providing complete unique web design services in combination with its other custom web designing, logo designing, corporate identity designs, flash animations, software development and seo services.

In the present online web business scenario the Entrepreneurs wants to give an attractive look to their online website for their online customers, so that they can make the viewers involved with their business for long. In this aspect 3D Graphics web & animation plays an important role in luring the online customers towards the site. 3D graphics and animation gives unique looks to any websites.

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India needs 10k animation experts for global play

AHMEDABAD: India needs at least 10,000 professional animators of international standards if it wants to survive the competition from countries such as Philippines, Korea and Taiwan, said director of the animation movie Hanuman VG Samanth.

He was in Ahmedabad to inaugurate a training campus of Digital Asia School of Animation association with Lakhotia Institute of Art & Design, a division of Lakhotia Computer Centre (LCC). Set up at an investment of Rs 50 lakh, the institute claims to churn out around 125 trained animators every year.

Speaking to the media after the inauguration, Mr Samanth said, “Barring one or two films, I am not happy with the quality of animated movies being made in the country. People are entering into the business just to make quick money. They produce low cost, low quality animation movies.”

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Title Pros and Cons of Using a Flash Web Site

Almost anyone can build web sites, but if you want to catch the attention of your web visitors, you may want to consider using a flash web site. A flash web site can deliver an interactive experience to the user by incorporating different elements like motion, sound, graphics, and video.

Flash web site development has come a long way since its inception in 1996. Seven out of the ten most popular sites on the web incorporate flash, and more than half a million web designers and developers regularly use flash to build web sites. But like everything, there are pros and cons to using a flash web site.

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Web programming and internet graphics

A website is an important part of any company's portfolio, and a well designed website is essential not only for business purposes, but for maintaining a presence online in general. The object of a website could be purely commercial, like e-commerce websites, or it could be for showcasing, and increasing awareness of products and services. Whatever the case may be, the duty of any webmaster is to make sure that his website is well developed, and is user friendly. A very popular question is “What makes a great website?”, well the answer is not as simple as it sounds. Firstly all websites are not alike, each client has his own set of requirements and conditions for a website.

In terms of web designing there are few critical aspects that have to be kept in mind, before a website can be considered as competitive or well designed. No matter what the reputation of the web development team, there are a set of rules and criteria that are common to all web sites. The first aspect that has to be kept in mind, is that the website should be user friendly. Irrespective of the purpose of the website, the website has to be user friendly, as a user has only a limited attention span, and if the user cannot find the information or product he is looking for easily, then chances are he will not return to the site a second time. This is especially true for e-commerce sites, in fact almost all e-commerce sites have a search feature, and detailed cataloguing of their products to make sure the web site is as user friendly as possible.

Just like the décor of an office reflects the attitude of the people that work there, similarly a website is a logical extension of a company's attitude and work ethic. One look at a website for any major manufacturing firm, and one can see that the websites are professional looking, and are free from glaring colours and fancy animations. This does not mean that having a colourful website, rich in graphics is a bad thing, a website meant for children, has to be colour rich and full of animation. The thing to remember is, that most web development firms make sure they understand the requirements of the client, and actually create a website that suits the client's market image and taste.

There is no shortage of ill designed websites on the internet, and the reason is that more often than not such websites are either developed by complete novices, or a web development firm that looks like it was in a hurry. It is therefore essential that the web development firm the webmaster deals with has prior experience in making similar sites. Finally if there is any kind of web development in terms of programming involved, a webmaster must have a pretty good idea of what he wants, and there has to be a balance between usability and functionality, with a tilt towards the former. At the end of the day, if the customer has to go through 4 or 5 pages, to order a product he will loose interest very fast,and might not shop with the website again.

Article Source: http://www.articlenetworks.com

Metakinetic Ltd is the author of this article on online shop solution. Find more information about web design here.

Design Considerations For Animated Websites

Web sites with animation, sound, video, and other enhancements can be interesting and promote user interactivity. However, websites with all the bells and whistles can also take too long to download and discourages users. Fortunatley, a wealth of techniques and options are available to help keep download time to a minimum.

-Bandwidth, which is the transfer rate of data to the user's browser, has hindered the development of websites with multiple media effects and enhancements.

-Many techniques and options are available to help keep website graphics and animation download time to a minimum and include use of tables, colour reduction and optimization of graphics, use of thumbnails, reuse of images, optimal placements of scripts, and selection offast loading type of web browsers such as Firefox.

-Several online web software tools are available to perform various tests on your web sites, such as web site garage, sitescan survey, pehtoori (html validation service), link alarm, and site inspector.

Bandwidth Issues

It was not long ago that the norm was the 56K modem. Today, many users (appr 55%) still use the 56K modems for surfing, so bandwidth must still be a concern to website designers. However, with technological advances such as fast cable modems, TI lines, etc, bandwidth will become less of a concern in the future. However, today you must still design websites with bandwidth in mind.

Many techniques and options are available to help keep website graphics and animation download times to a minimum. The following tips will help you create web pages that load as quickly as possible:

Use tables for putting graphics together to reduce the size of a gif animation. Depending on what your animation is like, tables can help reduce its overall file size. For example, you may have an image you want to animate, but only a small part of the image will actually be the animation. You can manually cut up the image into different pieces using a program like photoshop, or automatically, using a special utility like Ulead SmartSaver Pro. If you use photoshop, you must put the resulting graphics back together in your html editor using table cells. Programs like SmartSaver creat the html file with the graphics already in the table cells. By slicing up your image into sections, the samll part of the image that animates will now be in a table cell by itself. The rest of the image in the other table cells does not become part of tthe actual animation itself, thus reducing file size.

Reduce the colour palette of your gif animation. You can greatly reduce the size of your gif animation by reducing the number of colours in its colour palette. For example, if you have a 256 colour image and decrease its colour's to 64, the size of the animation will be significantly smaller. However, too much colour reduction may have an effect on image quality. Obviously, some complexities exist for animated gif creation. Fortunatley, several software options are available that help with palette and overall gif animation optimization, such as Equilibrium's Debabilizer, Digital Frontier's HVC ColorGif, Ulead's gif animator, as well as online gif optimizing services, such as gif wizard, and gif cruncher.

Reuse images throughout a website. Reusing images, if possible, is another way to decrease download time since the browser downloads and places the images in the pc's cache. For example, if you use an image on your home page and then use the same images on four other pages of the website, the image has to download just once. Thus, download time is kept to a minimum since one image downloads instead of five separate images.

Specify Height and Width in your html code for your animated gif images. You should always specify height and width in your html code for your animated gif images. If you do not specify height and width in your html code, then the browser will wait for the graphic to load before loading the text. You should also be aware that setting the height and width in your html code to a size smaller than the graphic will not reduce download time since the image's file size will remain the same as it was before.

Specify a low-res image to display as a high res image loads. You can create a low -res variation of a jpg or gif image to appear while waiting for the high res image to finish downloading. When you do this, the page appears to load much faster to the user. In reality, the extra image actually adds to the total download time. To add a low-res variation, you simply add an attribute to the image tag like the following:

IMG src="image-high-res.gif" lowsrc="image-low-res.gif"

Be sure to use jpgs for colourful photographic images. While you could compress your photographic images as gif images, jpeg compresses colourful images with generally better results, since jpg images offer 24 bit colour compared to gif images' 256 colours.

Substitute thumbnails for larger images on a webpage.

Use interlaced jpg and gif images. You can save your images as interlaced jpg and gif images that will display a preview of the images as they load.

Alright, now go and CREATE!

About Author : M.Adley is webmaster @ your3dsource.com , a resource for beginner to intermediate web designers and 3D artists. Learn Computer Animation Gif Animations

Source : http://www.articleblotter.com/

Use Of Graphic Design To Increase Website Useability

There can be no argument about the importance of design in attracting Internet users to a particular web site. No one would bother to explore the contents of a site if it does not contain eye-catching graphics that can please the visual sense of the users. With so many kinds of web sites existing online, it is extremely challenging to attract users and keep them interested in the site.

But a web site developer does not simply apply graphics freely on a site. Graphics should be used in the correct manner, or else, users might get turned off because the graphics featured just overwhelmed or confused them.

While it is true that attractive design is important for reasons that need not be explained, the choice of design must be carefully considered against the fulfilling the needs of users. When done successfully, it could be safely said that the web site has achieved its goals.

Graphics used in the Internet is inextricably linked to multimedia. Multimedia is a combination of graphics, text, sound, and animation to express a message to users. The multimedia features that will be incorporated to a web site should be dependent on the content. In general, multimedia and graphics should serve as supports to content, and should have precise, instructional purpose.

According to research, animated images can facilitate the transfer of learning in a positive way if it is utilized to show a vital part of the concept that is being illustrated. On the other hand, animation can serve as a barrier to user recall and performance.

Here are the guidelines in incorporating graphics to web sites:

1. Justify the usage of the graphics
   The most obvious problem that can be seen on web pages is the over-usage of graphics. The main downside of this is that complicated, unnecessary graphics can take a long time to download, and this, of course, will not sit well with users. The graphics to be applied should support the transfer of data and should also be in relation to the accompanying text.
2. The difference between graphics with text-redundant data and those containing information that is non-redundant is that the former facilitates and ushers in the learning process, while the latter does not either help or slow down learning.
3. Consistency should be a priority in graphic design
4. Web pages should be marked up so that text will be downloaded before the graphics. In this way, the users will know immediately if the page has the information that they are looking for, and if not, they will be able to save precious waiting time knowing that they do not need that certain page.
5. The loading of graphics should be controlled as such that loading will commence from top to bottom, and the users scrolling down the page will encounter said graphics.
6. The downloading of pages should be fast in order to save users waiting time, and in order to reduce the chances that they will get frustrated that they will abandon plans to download. Here are several ways to achieve fast download periods:
   
   -Keep the physical size of the graphics to a minimum
   -Images should be combined in order to minimize the number of server connections. Remember, the more connections that exists, the slower the download time will be
   -Decrease image resolution
   -Limit the colors that will be used for the images
   -Limit the use of animation

Animation is very much a part of web graphic design. The primary difference between web text and graphics and contents that are print-based is the dynamics. Moving displays attract the attention of users as long as the frequency of the display is regulated. Too much animation display can irritate and distract users. An animation that is perpetually moving can destroy the readable quality of the web page.

The usage of blinking texts should be avoided. It has long been regarded as an overused feature and the latest browsers no longer support it.

In designing a web site, there always exists a conflict between the desire to have total control over the appearance of a page and the need to permit users to establish their own preferences. The general appearance of the page should be made by the designer, but there are certain elements that users should have control over, such as color and text background, and the option whether to display graphics or not.

It takes a considerable amount of effort to establish and maintain the attractiveness and efficiency of a web site. If the guidelines above will be followed, all the efforts of web designers will bear desirable results. They only have to remember that the benefit of the users will always be the basis for everything.

Source :http://www.articleblotter.com/

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If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Than An Animation Is Worth A Settlement!

Courtroom re-enactment though forensic animation can be a very effective tool in persuading a jury to decide in your client’s favor. Technology is enhancing civil and criminal litigation, mediations, arbitrations and case depositions in a rapid manner. One study by the National Center for State Courts has determined that 82 percent of trials using 3D modeling as demonstrative evidence have led to victory.

How jurors perceive a witness, speaks directly to their opinion of the witness’s character. One study by the ACTA Press stated, “A well designed animation can influence a jurors' interpretation of the participant's activities in terms of perceived aggression, curiosity, jealousy, fear, provocation, relationships, roles and responsibilities, and guilt and innocence.” Jurors will become more emotionally connected in the animation as motion, texture, and lighting are rendered in more sophisticated ways.

How Animation can be used:
The development of computer forensic animation prior to deposition will highlight where information and collaboration is required, helping focus questions while eliciting complete information. By displaying 3D modeling during question and answer sessions by asking, "Is this what happened?" Animation will make the facts clearer to the jury. Computer animation helps juries understand in tangible terms what might otherwise remain an abstract concept. Computer forensics and 3D modeling has been proven to be better than any other type of demonstrative evidence according to a United States District Court Judge.

"I have noticed repeatedly that when a document is displayed on the monitors, the jurors sit up and pay attention. Such attention is far greater than that given to a document or situation which they cannot see as it is being discussed by the attorney and the witness."

"As long as technology is beneficial in helping jurors understand the facts and, more importantly, in expediting the trial, few judges will oppose it."

United States District Judge Carl Rubin

Examples of use:

Imagine for a moment a lawyer asking a witness, “If the truck was traveling at 50 miles per hour, and hit the side of the building in this spot, what would happen to the truck?" Working with the right 3D animator, the incident can be re-enacted with the true physics of force, surface texture and speed applied to get an enhanced image of the circumstances.

Demonstrating the intricate details of an accident scene, whether portraying a medical procedure or forensic mechanism of injury, there are virtually no limitations to what can be visualized using computer animation coupled with scientific and statistical evidence.

• A vehicle traveling at X miles per hour vs. Y miles per hour
• If a truck had veered ten feet sooner
• If a vat of chemicals had been placed here vs. there
• If the train operator had really seen or heard the signal
• If the substance was indeed harmless

Recently their was a trial where the plaintiff charged an architect with improperly designing a bridge. The defendant hired a graphic animation designer who took the blueprints, created a sketch drawing and built the bridge with the computer. Then, with the assistance of an engineer, the animator found that the bridge was designed properly. In fact, there had been an accident concerning a car colliding with a support column, which was not reported to the authorities until after the suit began. The animator then re-created the truck accident to show the damage to the bridge and its lingering effects.

Why Use Forensic Animation:

3D computer animations and images remain imbedded in the mind of the viewer long after they are offered as demonstrative evidence. Accidents, models, science or medial scenes, etc. are recreated to scale, through the use of computer animation, from expert or police reports. These animations are both visually presented to the jury. Statistics have shown people in general are much more likely to retain visual information that auditory information such as witness testimony.

A cardinal rule of persuasion or debate is to always show, rather than tell someone what happened. By showing the jury your client’s perspective, while the opposing side tells their client’s perspective, the jury is much more likely to identify and believe the visual presentation, all things being equal. As the old adage goes: a picture is worth a thousand words, and I would submit if a picture is worth a thousand words, than an animation is worth a settlement!

This Article was written by Micahel Goldstein, ESQ. for Courtroom Tools, a Forensic Animation and litigation technology Company in Massachusetts.

Source : http://www.articledashboard.com/