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Web Design

I thought I'd mention which tools I used to create this site and the experience gained. If you have better tools I'd apprechiate a hint. 

Photographs

  • On the riding hike in Norway I used my Olympus AZ-1 Zoom. It´s the most reliable camera I´ve owned. It consistently delivers photos with perfect focus and exposure, even at difficult lighting conditions, and it´s fully automatic so that I don´t need to think...
  • For scanning-in the positive film a borrowed an Olympus Film Scanner ES-10. This scanner is reasonably cheap. It has good resolution, up to 177000 dpi. The colour resolution is 8 bits in grey-scale or 24 bits in colour (8 bits per primary colour). To my experiense this resolution is too low. It´s difficult to capture all colour nuances, especially if the picture has big contrast. If the scanner had greater colour resolution it would be easier to post-process the pictures. 
  • I used GIMP to post-process the scanned slides. This tool is great for retouching photographs. 

Graphic Art

  • All graphic art was created using GIMP

Page Design

  • Page design is much harder that I thought it would be. I want my pages to look good in all resolutions, window sizes and browsers. This limits the features you can use. It would be much easier to make nice layout for fix-width displays, and indeed, most commercial sites use this. On my 19" screen at work these pages look ridiculous, with all contents on the page collected in the upper left corner of the browser!

  • Different browsers render the HTML-code in different ways. I've worked hard to make sure that the layout is acceptable in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Tools

  • "GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring." GIMP is a powerful tool but it takes practice to be good with it. Very useful resources can be found at www.gimp.org, including Linux versions. The windows version I use comes from user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/. It is usefull but not completely stable. You'll absolutely need the GIMP User Manual. It is excellent and can also be downloaded.
  • For page-design I've used Microsoft Frontpage Express 2.0. This must be one of the worst crap of software I used. (Have M-t inserted delay loops to slow Frontpage down? After using the Express version, I would not even consider trying the full version.) It's only advantage is that you can read and edit the HTML code directly, which has been necessary for me to learn how HTML works. I've also tried Netscape Composer, part of Netscape Communicator 4.06, it's much faster but the HTML-editor is not integrated. Also Netscape Composer don't indent the HTML-code; this makes the files smaller but harder to read.

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© Copyright Tord Björsne 1999
Last edited 1999-10-03