If you don’t mind, can you take a quick look at http://www.notyetrain.org and just let me know whether everything is readable? And if it’s not, if there are any particular bits that are hard to read and why?
(Yes, it’s Flash. It’s a film site and we were working with an agency. I could say lots more, but really… I just need feedback on the basics.)
This entry is very protected, for obvious reasons — MANY many thanks for your help!!!!
Realm of the Lint Queen 
All looks good to me. Vista, Firefox 3, 1280×800.
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Thanks for the help — good to know browser and res. too!
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The video has nasty lines in it – maybe it needs to be deinterlaced or something. Also the the video starts at zero volume. The rest of the site looks nice.
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I saw this, too. Also, the shadow on the donate button makes it a little hard to read, but other than that, site looks amazing.
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Thank you — I saw the same thing, but was afraid it was just that I hadn’t gotten enough sleep!
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It looks fine, clicked around.
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Thanks very much — appreciate all the extra eyeballs!
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Overall, looks good. Here are my few comments:
* text weight issue
About Not Yet Rain -> About The Filmmaker
The text here is in a different, lighter (not as bold) font which I find hard to read against the scratchy burlap-like background. (Overall, I’m not a fan of that background overall because I find it detracts from the text in general, but I’m able to read the more-bold text OK.)
* social bookmarks
On mouseover of the social bookmark link icons, the text popups show a Javascript-looking function call rather than something interesting like “Share via Facebook”.
* video
Same comments about the video as others have mentioned:
Volume starts off at 0 (I would recommend a default of 50%)
There are odd horizontal fuzz lines in the video, almost like scan lines on an old TV; not sure if they are intentional, but they look more like an artifact of video conversion or compression than something someone would choose to do for artistic reasons.
* window size
I’m running Windows XP, Firefox 3, 1600×1200
I keep my non-fullscreen windows smaller (approx 1000×740), and the site is wider and taller than that. It’s not a big deal, and I find more and more sites like that these days. However, because the Flash app takes over the whole screen space, I can’t middle-button click and get the pan-around widget that I’m used to using in Firefox when the page is larger than my window. (I think IE has the same sort of widget.) On the same front, I also can’t use mouse scroll wheel or page up/page down b/c Flash app has/owns the focus and doesn’t pass any of that through to the browser. I doubt there’s anything to be done about this.
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ROTFLOL!
YES! We both caught the bookmark tooltip issue, the volume=zero issue and the artifacts in video issue. And I HATES the burlap, I do.
(I can say that now. I didn’t want to bias.)
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I looked briefly under 3 different web browsers. I’ll echo the comments above about some of the text being just slightly hard to read. In particular, the somewhat blocky font being used for most of the links has some weight and spacing problems. For instance, the link labeled “DONATE” looks to me like “DONFITE”; “SIGN UP FOR UPDATES” looks like “SIGN UP FOR UPDFITES”. I guess most of the problems have to do with the capital letter A. Also, the same font is used to say “CLICK TO PLAY” for the video; there’s not enough room for the whole phrase, so the “Y” is chopped in half.
With respect to the video, I noticed a lot of the same artifacts someone else noted above. I’m guessing it’s due to compression, as they show up more when there’s motion in the scene. Also, the text used throughout the video looks too rasterized.
The static text blocks used beneath the video, to the bottom right for the updates section, and for the “ORDER DVD” page have a white wire-brush effect underneath them that makes it a little hard to read the text. I’d probably screen that down, or make it somehow a more uniform background for the text. Additionally, the second sentence in the text underneath the video — the one that starts “While the law was a promising change” — could stand (IMO) to be reworded.
Most of the text in the site seems to be rendered as images rather than as text. That’ll make it hard for a viewer of the page to change the text size if they’re having trouble reading it or fitting it on their screen.
I’m not a pro at any of this, so I hope my comments are actually helpful. I might be a little too picky too, but too picky right now is probably what you want, right? :)
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THANK YOU JOE!!!!
It’s the capital “A” = “fi” that I saw and Adrian saw and I can’t get anyone to believe me about. My guess is that Adrian and I have hi-res monitors and the other ppl I work with who didn’t see it don’t have hi-red monitors OR they have Macs and that’s why they don’t see it.
But to me if THREE people see the SAME misreading there’s a problem.
Your other feedback is 100% dead on too and I’ve passed it all on — the not being able to resize the text issue I hadn’t caught, but I’ll add that. (It’s ’cause the whole thing’s in flash, but they can add a control for resizing).
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Flash is Evil. There — I’ve said it. :)
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(someone had too. I couldn’t. :-(
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What the others have said, basically. Looks good overall, and original. The “ORDER DVD” and “DONATE” are a little hard to read, perhaps partly because of the white font color. “WOMEN’S STORIES” (the one just above “Coming soon!”) looks like “WOMEN’s STORES,” and in general the font used for headers like that may be a little too scratchy.
Sometimes the screens are slow to load, but that is likely due to a slow connection on my end.
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thank you thank you! The “women’s stores” is a good catch — I hadn’t seen that one. (And it’s kinda ironic too… so very very far from the topic at hand.)
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Not sure if this is new, and I didn’t want to leave it in a comment on your other post, but the title tag is set to “NotYetRain_Website_Shell”.
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Thank you — just got a comment about that one from a co-worker too!
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