diplom.erikagrafika.com

[diogo]

Erika needed a simple website to showcase the books that she designed. I think this is as simple as a book showcase can get

http://diplom.erikagrafika.com/

There are lots of transparent PNGs to be shown at the same time (transparency because of the shadows and cut corners), to make them smaller I found an amazing tool http://pngquant.org/. No kidding, this tools can cut the size of a "saved for web" transparent PNG to half. I love how you can use it in a bunch of directories at the same time from the terminal, but if you only need it for a few pictures and don't want to mess around with the terminal, this online tool uses exactly the same process http://tinypng.org/.

edit: I must have messed up the title, can someone entitled change it to "diplom.erikagrafika.com"?

[Adam Kiss]

Changed.

I must say I'm not really a fan of hunting tiny click areas, so I'm not the biggest fan of this either

Re: PNGs from PS are always bloated, I've seen crushers make PNGs smaller by as much as 80%.

[diogo]

Thanks Adam.

Tiny? Hm, what's the size of your screen?

[Adam Kiss]

1280x800…

Also my bad! I didn't realize you can move the books around! Even though, I like simpler things , but as a contemporary/experimental solution - it's rather nice. And also, I must say I am in love with the font on the background (or root domain) - your work as well?

[diogo]

Also my bad

Not really... this is a usability problem, so it's my bad. I will be away from the computer, but as soon as I come back I will think of a solution. Meanwhile, and as a temporary solution, I changed the cursor to the dragging hands hoping that they give a clue already.

This is also why I like to post my sites here in the forum

[MatthewSchenker]

Hey Diogo,

This is very interesting, and not something you see every day. Thanks to you, the author has a site that is simple but unique.

My only issue is that the smaller books get lost, and so do the ones at the bottom of the "stack." Even though you can drag the titles around, after a short while you have titles on top of each other again. I tested this on the iPad, and everything works great, but the screen real estate gets filled even more quickly.

As an expansion, it would be interesting to have each book link to a page for that title.

Letting visitors shuffle the books around like this is an amazing central concept. I can imagine using this for a lot of other projects -- not just books. For example, this same idea could apply to photos. I wonder if it would help to start off with two or three different stacks (for example), maybe arranged by theme?

Thanks,

Matthew

[diogo]

Adam, sorry, with the hurry to leave I forgot to answer to your question about the typeface. It's not my work unfortunately The font is called "LiebeErika" and was designed by the German designer Ulrike Wilhelm. Her fonts are here http://liebefonts.com/. They are really cute and well designed, and not expensive at all.

Matthew, thanks for your nice answer! I also think that the idea has potential to be used in a different way, but that way we did it was conscious attending to the very specific objectives of this site. The site will be shown to a very limited, hand picked, number of people (besides the forum, of course). And the idea is to state that Erika has some experience in designing books to take these contacts a step further, not showing a lot of the books themselves. So, it's not really meant to be a gallery.