{"rowid": 102, "title": "Art Directing with Looking Room", "contents": "Using photographic composition techniques to start to art direct on the template-driven web.\n\nThink back to last night. There you are, settled down in front of the TV, watching your favourite soap opera, with nice hot cup of tea in hand. Did you notice \u2013 whilst engrossed in the latest love-triangle \u2013 that the cameraman has worked very hard to support your eye\u2019s natural movement on-screen? He\u2019s carefully framed individual shots to create balance.\n\nThink back to last week. There you were, sat with your mates watching the big match. Did you notice that the cameraman frames the shot to go with the direction of play? A player moving right will always be framed so that he is on the far left, with plenty of \u2018room\u2019 to run into.\n\nBoth of these cameramen use a technique called Looking Room, sometimes called Lead Room. Looking Room is the space between the subject (be it a football, or a face), and the edge of the screen. Specifically, Looking Room is the negative space on the side the subject is looking or moving. The great thing is, it\u2019s not just limited to photography, film or television; we can use it in web design too.\n\nBasic Framing\n\nBefore we get into Looking Room, and how it applies to web, we need to have a look at some basics of photographic composition.\n\nMany web sites use imagery, or photographs, to enhance the content. But even with professionally shot photographs, without a basic understanding of framing or composition, you can damage how the image is perceived. \n\nA simple, easy way to make photographs more interesting is to fill the frame. \n\nTake this rather mundane photograph of a horse:\n\n\n\nA typical point and click affair. But, we can work with this.\n\nBy closely cropping, and filling the frame, we can instantly change the mood of the shot.\n\n\n\nI\u2019ve also added Looking Room on the right of the horse. This is space that the horse would be walking into. It gives the photograph movement.\n\nSubject, Space, and Movement\n\nGenerally speaking, a portrait photograph will have a subject and space around them. Visual interest in portrait photography can come from movement; how the eye moves around the shot. To get the eye moving, the photographer modifies the space around the subject.\n\nLook at this portrait:\n\n\n\nThe photography has framed the subject on the right, allowing for whitespace, or Looking Room, in the direction the subject is looking. The framing of the subject (1), with the space to the left (2) \u2013 the Looking Room \u2013 creates movement, shown by the arrow (3).\n\n\n\nNote the subject is not framed centrally (shown by the lighter dotted line).\n\nIf the photographer had framed the subject with equal space either side, the resulting composition is static, like our horse.\n\n\n\nIf the photographer framed the subject way over on the left, as she is looking that way, the resulting whitespace on the right leads a very uncomfortable composition.\n\n\n\nThe root of this discomfort is what the framing is telling our eye to do. The subject, looking to the left, suggests to us that we should do the same. However, the Looking Room on the right is telling our eye to occupy this space. The result is a confusing back and forth.\n\nHow Looking Room applies to the web\n\nWe can apply the same theory to laying out a web page or application. Taking the three same elements \u2013 Subject, Space, and resulting Movement \u2013 we can guide a user\u2019s eye to the elements we need to. As designers, or content editors, framing photographs correctly can have a subtle but important effect on how a page is visually scanned. Take this example:\n\n\n\nThe BBC homepage uses great photography as a way of promoting content. Here, they have cropped the main photograph to guide the user\u2019s eye into the content. \n\nBy applying the same theory, the designer or content editor has applied considerable Looking Room (2) to the photograph to create balance with the overall page design, but also to create movement of the user\u2019s eye toward the content (1)\n\n\n\nIf the image was flipped horizontally. The Looking Room is now on the right. The subject of the photograph is looking off the page, drawing the user\u2019s eye away from the content. Once again, this results in a confusing back and forth as your eye fights its way over to the left of the page.\n\n\n\nA little bit of Art Direction\n\nArt Direction can be described as the act or process of managing the visual presentation of content. Art Direction is difficult to do on the web, because content and presentation are, more often than not, separated. But where there are images, and when we know the templates that those images will populate, we can go a little way to bridging the gap between content and presentation.\n\nBy understanding the value of framing and Looking Room, and the fact that it extends beyond just a good looking photograph, we can start to see photography playing more of an integral role in the communication of content. \n\nWe won\u2019t just be populating templates. We\u2019ll be art directing.\n\nPhoto credits: \n\n\n\tPortrait by Carsten Tolkmit\n\tHorse by Mike Pedroncelli", "year": "2008", "author": "Mark Boulton", "author_slug": "markboulton", "published": "2008-12-05T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2008/art-directing-with-looking-room/", "topic": "design"}
{"rowid": 108, "title": "A Festive Type Folly", "contents": "\u2018Tis the season to be jolly, so the carol singers tell us. At 24 ways, we\u2019re keeping alive another British tradition that includes the odd faux-Greco-Roman building dotted around the British countryside, Tower Bridge built in 1894, and your Dad\u2019s Christmas jumper with the dancing reindeer motif. \u2018Tis the season of the folly!\n\n \n 24 Ways to impress your friends\n \n\nThe example is not an image, just text. You may wish to see a screenshot in Safari to compare with your own operating system and browser rendering.\n\nLike all follies this is an embellishment\u200a\u2014\u200aa bit of web typography fun. It\u2019s similar to the masthead text at my place, but it\u2019s also a hyperlink. Unlike the architectural follies of the past, no child labour was used to fund or build it, just some HTML flavoured with CSS, and a heavy dose of Times New Roman. Why Times New Roman, you ask? Well, after a few wasted hours experimenting with heaps of typefaces, seeking an elusive consistency of positioning and rendering across platforms, it proved to be the most consistent. Who\u2019d\u2018a thought? To make things more interesting, I wanted to use a traditional scale and make the whole thing elastic by using relative lengths that would react to a person\u2019s font size. So, to the meat of this festive frippery:\n\nThere are three things we rely on to create this indulgence:\n\n\n\tDescendant selectors\n\tAbsolute positioning\n\tInheritance\n\n\nHTML & Descendant Selectors\n\nThe markup for the folly might seem complex at first glance. To semantics pedants and purists it may seem outrageous. If that\u2019s you, read on at your peril! Here it is with lots of whitespace:\n\n\n\nWhy so much markup? Well, we want to individually style many of the glyphs. By nesting the elements, we can pick out the bits we need as descendant selectors.\n\nTo retain a smidgen of semantics, the text is wrapped in