DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER & Dr. Dan Diaper.
VEIWING AND TOURING THE GALLERY
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VIEWING THE GALLERY
- What do you do, or would like to do, when you
visit a physical art gallery?
- Do you want to do something similar when you
visit a computer gallery?
- Could you “do something similar” with most
digital galleries?
These are important questions to a gallery designer. They are also important questions to The Artist, who may have different answers from his gallery’s visitors.
As a gallery visitor, Dr. Diaper’s answer to the first question is in two parts: (a) to be able to make a leisurely tour of the gallery, looking carefully, but briefly, at what is on display; and (b) to stop for quite a long time (say, at least 5 minutes) to look at something in detail. His answer to the second and third questions above is: “Yes.” and “No.”, respectively.
As The Artist, Dr. Diaper wants people to look at the carefully selected photographs in his gallery. After all, he has chosen only a few to display from tens of thousands. Of course, he likes them all, will argue that each has merit, indeed, that every one of them would be attractive on a wall in the right setting for a particular photograph purchaser. In the end, he wants people to buy his photographs so that they can be displayed and enjoyed, over time.
These views, and not disputing that there are others, have led to the design of the DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER Photograph Gallery. Each photograph displayed, even though a compressed thumbnail, is relatively large and can be satisfactorily viewed even on high definition screens. Furthermore, each gallery is sectioned into galleries of twenty or so photographs. This is a deliberate, alternative design to that used in many on-line galleries, where hundreds, or even thousands, of small thumbnail images are presented to viewers in a vast block; which means that nearly all are ignored; which isn’t what The Artist wants! Thus, by design, the DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER Photograph Gallery is a Photograph Gallery; it is there to be visited, for the photographs to be enjoyed (and if purchases are made, that’s good as well), and it is not intended primarily as “an on-line resource” to be skimmed. For people who don’t want to visit the Photograph Gallery, and just want to view a big block of images, a Micro-Thumbprint Photograph Gallery is also provided.
Every page of the DDD SYSTEMS website will dynamically fit the size of a user’s window. Particularly when viewing the Photograph Gallery, a full screen, or as large as comfortable, window is recommended. The effects of adjusting window width can be seen on the six screen photographs below; the narrower the window, the more vertical scrolling is necessary.
Selecting a photograph from the Gallery will display a full size image, uncompressed, in a new window. Generally, the quality of the image is determined by the window size. The full size images that are provided are in .jpeg format of dimensions 3072 x 2304. For many users, the easiest way to view the highest quality available, is to view the image in a picture viewer rather than from within their web browser. All the images in the Photograph Gallery can be copied and viewed this way.
TOURING
THE GALLERY
Deliberately, by design, (see VIEWING THE GALLERY above) there is no automatic tour of the DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER Photograph Gallery. Using the mouse is like walking around a physical art gallery. It is possible to visit every gallery by following the signpost icons at the end of a gallery’s set of photographs. This will take the visitor on a tour in the same order as listed when the [NAVIGATE] button is used.
The visitor, however, can choose what to see, in what order, and how long they want to spend on each photograph and how long in each gallery. They might want to look at the Photograph Gallery Guide while wandering around the Galleries, or they might want to just jump to one gallery. The DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER Photograph Gallery has been designed to provide a wide range of navigation aids to help visitors tour the Gallery, as displayed in the figure below:
The first and main way to tour the Photograph Gallery is by selecting a signpost, which will take you to a particular Gallery section or entrance.
The first and last signpost on each Gallery page provides an exit – it’s like turning around and leaving that particular gallery, either after poking your head around the entrance, or after you’ve looked at the photographs – so you’ll return to the last gallery entrance you visited.
Each page starts with a gallery title and underneath this the Photograph Gallery Map, which provides a visual plan of the gallery and a “YOU ARE HERE” sticker for each gallery. Selecting the Map simply enlarges it.
Selecting the Photograph Gallery Guide goes to a gallery’s particular entry within the whole Guide and the signposts and text links in the Guide take visitors directly to their appropriate Gallery. Thus, the Guide provides another way to tour the DDD SYSTEMS Art PRINTER Photograph Gallery.
If there are related Galleries to the one being visited, then there are signposts to these after the Photograph Gallery Guide icon. If a Gallery is divided into sub-galleries, then there will be signposts to these both after the Guide icon and at the end of the photographs in the gallery being visited. The current gallery being visited icon, which repeats the Gallery’s title, is at the beginning of the displayed photographs and has a grey, rather than white background. Gallery entrances work in the same way, but don’t, of course, have displayed photographs.
Using the [NAVIGATE] button provides a hierarchical index of text links that allows visitors to go directly to any particular gallery or gallery entrance (or to any page of the website). The Navigate page also provides visitors with a footprint of where they have already been in the Photograph Gallery, as the visited links should change colour (on most web browsers).
For those who have visited the Photograph Gallery before and want to know what is new, then information on all website changes can be found, at the bottom of Navigation page, via the Website Updates link. In addition, the latest photographs will be at the beginning of the, otherwise unordered, Micro-Thumbnail Photograph Gallery.
The main Photograph Gallery Entrance has its own special, suspended signpost icon, which when selected allows visitors to choose between the two wings of the Photograph Gallery: either ‘Nature’ or ‘Abstract & Modern’.
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