The Critique & Feedback thread

[Guardian]

http://www.guardian1239.com/

Looking for feedback on the design. I was going for something simple and clean, but still kinda cool.

[Kirito]

http://www.guardian1239.com/

Looking for feedback on the design. I was going for something simple and clean, but still kinda cool.

Well, for one, the background, due to it's color variation should be a jpg, not a gif. It's far too grainy IMHO, and generally makes the design look a lot worse than it actually is. There a few other things, but the background is really bothering me too much to go into them.

[Jacket]

Valdred, with the sharp artwork I wouldn't go with a soft gradient (or most any gradient) for the background personally. I always thought illustrations over gradients clashed. If I'm alone on that, then never-you-mind. The colors aren't too dark, they help pop the art like a weasel chasing a monkey around a mulberry bush. I have no idea what a mulberry bush is, by the by.

Yin, your animation is smoother than mine to be sure, but I think your sprites would benefit without the pillow shading. Your armored rider's light sources are contradictory, the front leg shows a light source from in front, while the weapon has the reverse for example. This is common when pillow shading. The cactus' animation is a bit jarring at parts - below the chin, on both sides, as well as the sudden darkening in shadow on it's left arm by the tongue. Only because the dark shadow vanishes for frame.

Guardian, why does deviantart go to DA, as well as photography and poetry? It would be far better to simply cut it all as a DA link, or keep it all on one site. If I go to a site, a common thing I'll do the first time there is open several links in new tabs just for look-a-bouts, and I ended up opening 3 of the same thing XD. Tsk, tsk. As for facebook & twitter, it's very popular to condense them to a 'follow' link set. While I don't think it's good or bad to do it that way or yours, it's just popular, and quickly becoming a norm. Though I like that you didn't do what a lot of people do and put in an icon/button (the Facebook F button, for example) and just jam it in there in a section that is otherwise just text.
And yes, the background is very grainy.

[Guardian]

@Xenres - I spent a while trying different image file types, but I don't think I've tried .jpg. For some reason I can't remember, I have a grudge against .jpg images, which is why I didn't use it in the first place. It'll be fixed, though! x3

@Jacket - EJlol commented on that, too. I'm planning on moving things over to the site so that it'll all be there, so the dA links are a kind of placeholder at the moment. And the links are actually searches of my gallery so it's narrowed down to that category, or at least it should be. I'll have to see about a link set for Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps I'll try creating a drop-down menu for it.

Thanks so much for your feedback! :D

[Kirito]

@Gaurdian, yeah, well the best format would be png, however the fact that you're serving it as a webpage background, a little compression goes a long way. Unfortunately, gif over compresses things, so the bad picture encoding gets to be very obvious, especially on the high resolution screens most of us use today. ( note: don't use png unless you want to totally slaughter page load times. For webpages, reserve png for smaller images like logos and button graphics. png images are just way to large for large graphics that need to be displayed real time over a network connection )

[Guardian]

PNG is what I save all of my edited photography in, but I experienced very quickly that it wasn't going to work for a webpage. I've switched over to using a .jpg image and it does look better, so thank you for the suggestion! :)

I'd also like some opinions on http://www.guardian1239.com/photography, which I created yesterday. I need to figure out a way to make the div background partially transparent while keeping the photos at 100% opacity, but otherwise I'm happy with it. I'll probably message my friend Mark about possible solutions to the transparency problem.

(I also figured out that making thumbnails makes the page load a helluva lot faster than using the full images with height and width specifications. XD)