We launched 2 great new web sites last week for Dublin City of Science 2012 and for the Euroscience Open Forum 2012…we think they are two of our best sites yet!

A Wee Feature on Mick Minogue at the For The Love Of Progress Show with ebow & Gallery Number One

ebow & Gallery Number One presents - Drive Operation Game by Mick Minogue

The title of this article may lead you to believe we’ve started a babysitting service, we haven’t. We just let some rad artists in to do their thang in the gallery. And they are making the most of it.

We run as ebow and Gallery Number One. It’s a symbiotic union you can read more about here.

We invited local art and design collective For The Love Of in to Gallery Number One for a show and they decided to run an exhibition based on the theme of ‘Progress’. The gallery is open Thursday through to Sunday 10am – 5pm. And if you have been in already it’s worth your while dropping by again as Mick Minogue is gradually illustrating our ceiling. Mick is a self-confessed ‘crafty little beggar’ and working professionally as an illustrator and maker of things. He’s worked on campaigns such as the Undergrowth Movement for Bulmers and represented Ireland in the Secret Wars – an International event where illustrators and graffiti artists battle it out (through drawing) in front of a live audience.

As part of the For The Love Of Progress show Mick is showing his ‘Drive’ themed version of the well-loved kids game ‘Operation’ and as previously mentioned he’s illustrating directly onto the ceiling.

Going back to the childhood pursuits of playing games and drawing on the walls sounds a little more like regression that progression eh? Wrong. Progression, according to our window text based piece by Kathryn Maguire ‘is not possible without deviation from the norm’. We commonly refer to this as thinking outside the box. It’s great to get an artist into our gallery who is humble and honest enough to make work that deviates from the norm by having a bit of fun.

He’s admitted that after watching the film ‘Drive’ he came out of the cinema as influenced as he had the first time he had watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film as a kid. The start to ‘Drive’ is as quietly tense as you will be when you set the timer on Mick’s game and attempt to remove each of the pieces without setting off the revving engine sounds.

As for drawing on the walls, this is no Crayola scribbling. Mick is introducing an awesome, ceiling-sweeping whale complete with nautical tattoos to our gallery, little by little. A whale with tattoos is a form of progress. And it’s progress that the whale is on the ceiling and not just in Mick’s brilliant imagination.

ebow & Gallery Number One

1 Castle Street, Dublin 2

Mick Minogue – The Real Human Being Operation Game from Albert Hooi on Vimeo.

A Whale of a Time

And we’ll be hosting an evening of mince pies and mulled wine soon to celebrate the show and the completion of Mick’s Sistine Whale.

Keep an eye on our facebook page for updates on when that will happen.

In this web design blog we’ve got the ebow design team to share their Top 5 considerations for the design of the GAA.ie homepage….we hope any budding web designers 0ut there find it helpful, and of course feel free to comment or ask any questions (ie please do!), you can tweet us too if you like: @ebowdublin with hash tag #webdesign

Being briefed to give an existing design additional features is always a designer’s biggest challenge, picking up where another designer left off, and creating a new, impactful landing page for GAA.ie was no different. First and foremost, you want to give the original design justice, particularly as the inner pages are remaining in their current form, but you want to make the design changes significant enough to have impact on the regular user, and to allow the site to remain functional and easy-to-navigate.

Secondly, you have to consider what the homepage’s priority is, what is being given prime real estate above the fold*. In this instance, that is the site’s focal point; its daily news. To broadcast each top story out to the users visually, a slider was chosen to intermittently showcase each entry ensures the newest, freshest, most visually-appealing content features in prime positioning on the site.

*  The fold in web design is the position on a web page where the majority of browsers viewing the page will begin to scroll. Elements that are positioned “below the fold” are not seen when the page first loads.

640 x 480 fold is around 310 pixels down
800 x 600 fold is around 430 pixels down
1024 x 768 fold is around 600 pixels down
1200 x 1024 fold is around 850 pixels down
1600 x 1200 fold is around 1030 pixels down

Thirdly, you have to consider how to display the volume of crucial data involved in news headlines, upcoming fixtures and updated results above the fold line; data no GAA fan is going to want to hunt to find. The optimum solution for this resulted in a tabbed feature, where users could tab and scroll between each, as well as being offered a link to view them all in further detail within the site itself.

Then, you have to consider the longevity of the homepage and that elements will need to be swapped, replaced, added, removed and changed from time to time. The best solution was to create a column/grid layout within the site’s existing restraints, which almost works on a modular level; allowing features to able to be added/removed/swapped/replaced over time.

Lastly, you have to consider what other key areas of interest warrant the prominence of being housed on the homepage; and then prioritise their positioning against their fellow homepage features. The above-fold-features need no introduction; the regular interest demanded of the news, fixtures and results already dictated their prime positioning, then the less regularly-visited, more specialist features begin to appear a little further down the page – simply because the users wanting this content don’t mind delving a little deeper to get it.

You view the live homepage by clicking here and don’t forget to Like ebow on Facebook for more!

The ebow Crew