Decorate our Whare

The Tukutuku panels are used to tell a story and to decorate the Whare. By sending us your Tukutuku panel you are telling us your design story and adding aesthetic beauty to the interior of the For the Masses meeting house.

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SideRoom

Hello peeps.
You all should go and have a look at www.sideroom.com. It is an online art gallery for young NZ artists to show their work to an international audience. At no cost! We have been operating for about 6 months and have had a lot of interest thus far. We are trying to get a new show in the gallery every month from now on. So check it out.
-Peace-

Thanks.
Regan

nice regan. my only gripe is that it takes a bit of mucking around before you finally get to see the gallery

I took a look at the site, nice design, but I did have a few comments about the functionality - which I offer here as friendly advice ;-) I think the idea is a good one (so i hope you don't think I'm knocking you.)

The 'entry' page looks awesome, except for the fact that it is an 'entry' page, which I hate. From a usability point of view, entry pages are redundant, and create a user experience bottleneck.

I also believe the interface for the gallery is verbose, and perhaps uses the wrong paradigm - it draws attention away from the artwork, which as blackspade mentioned, you have to wade through the site to get to. And when you do get to it, you can't get a very large version of the image, which takes away from the value of putting it online in the first place (it's just like being in a real gallery, except you're looking at everything through the bottom end of a coke bottle, and the lighting is bad.)

Overall I suppose that the site (which is wicked awesome) distracts from the artwork (I guess that's why so many galleries are painted white...) and I'm an HTML guy - so I'm a bit biased against the usability/accessibility issues surrounding flash. I won't go into it here, except to say that an HTML solution may have allowed for greater speed and flexibility.

In the end, the value of any site lies in it's content - so don't let the art be overshadowed. Remember - Content is King!

Cheers for the comments.

Must say I agree with most of what has been said. I am currently redesigning the site to run faster and not have such a bottle neck of unnecessary stuff. Also to make some room for sponsors and more interesting content.

As fas as html over flash goes... The problem is I will loose alot of the smoothness of flash. I have made a version of the gallery using javascript to do the panning but it is a bit clunky.

Any cheers.
New site comin soon

Peace