Robs homework: understanding web animation technology 1:

Here i will be posting 5 different types of web animation, what they are; a definition and an example/screenshot.

1. Banner Ads
"A graphical web advertising unit, typically measuring 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels tall (i.e. 468x60)."
http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/banner_ad/

On just about every website you'll see these things, flashing away or promting you to shoot five ducks to win a prize; they still occasionaly get you to click away at them, even if its just for a joke; it is a very affective form of advertisment and often very simple flash animation or game.

Here are a few screenshots:

2. Animated Inferface Elements:

"Animated Inferface elements" are on just about every website you will come accross, they can be as simple as changing an icon or buttons colour, make a drop down menu (as seen below); or can be more complex depending on the website, i think the majority of sites would be pretty dull if all you did was press buttons that did nothing... these simple Animated elements of websites largely go unnoitcied however, websites would be terrible without them

3 Linear and Interactive Animation:

Linear animation, is an animation that is always the same, no matter what you do, it simply repeats as you watch it; e.g. most flash videos (such as the "awesome series on youtube")

Interactive Animation, is animation, that yes, "interacts" with you (e.g. the samorost puzzles) you can control some aspect of the animation bascially.


4. Promtion, instruction and information:

Promotion:
We have already seen an example of how flash animation is used for promotion with the banner ads (see top of this post), "pop ups" are another example of how they are used for promotion; these are shapes, words etc that can sometimes cover your entire page, again annoying but effective advertisement.

Information:
Websites have various ways the relay information using animation; one example i found was on the Cadburys website (although it has changed since) it used to have a full section for learning abotu the site through an interactive walkthrough of the a cadburys factory with information popping up each time you "explored" a section; several sites have also adopted a similar method (e.g. npower have a similar section in there site)

Instruction:
Lots of websites use flash as instructions; using an interactive medium often makes learning new information easier, and often more bearable and interesting than reading so many walls of text. One good example I found was a "how to play" on the Warcraft trading card game website (now moved) it looked like a flash game that gave you a rundown of the games basics. methods like this are much more interesting than, like i said, numerous amounts of text.






5. Entertainment:

The most obvious of the lot, you dont have to look far to see that flash animation is all over the place on the web for entertainment, the most common being flash games. there are 100s of websites promoting yet 1000s more flash games. Be it simple or complex many of these flash games are enjoyed by people on a daily basis; even in the banner ads mentioned earlier, and linear flash animations are also often used for entertainment, through video series and comedy.