I am currently building a system that automatically create a redesign of an existing webpage. The new webpage should have better graphic design, better industrial design, and a state of the art implementation.
I’m looking for an existing webpage which has very good content but which is not designed according to state-of-the-art web design. Preferable the content is license under CC (Creative Commons) or similar. The web page should serve as a demonstration of the automatic redesigning system.
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1) What would be a good web site with good/important content but a bad web design?
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Current ideas include Project Gutenberg and educational youtube videos.
The following is a more detailed description and I would be VERY thankful for any feedback or any ideas or pointers. The motivation for the project is this: many websites we know have a poor design, esp. in the public sector, like our local hospital web page (more than 2000 beds but unusable webpage).
To help solve the problem we would like to create a system that can automatically redesign a web page and generate a new page of the existing content. A normal user gives the system annotations, about what is what, like navigation items or headlines, etc. Finally the systems generates different design proposals and the user can pick a suitable one.
It’s a open source project. We are currently me (programming and mathematics) and a graphic designer, but should soon 4 people. Our goal is to show a very basic/minimal working solution within the next 10 months. Just so that nobody asks: is this a one person project?? ;-)
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Current ideas:
Innovative interfaces a nice idea is www.cooliris.com/ but preferable without plug in. Also interesting are zoom interface www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuELwq2ThJE maybe even zoom.it/ Are there any further examples?
Ideally, a program would be able to distinguish between good and bad graphic design or at least find patterns among good designs. Parameters would be: pictures / colum widths according to the golden ratio, colors used, how much white space, etc. Dataset could be sites listed as ‘top 40 ‘, for example at www.designrfix.com/inspiration/web-design-40-fantastic-examples For the analysis: statistical visualization and maybe even bayesian learning.
Automatic document classification: to index existing web pages and PDF documents.
- semantic web
- rdf/owl, perhaps a user can annotate certain elements on a web page according to a predefined ontology.
Thanks for reading this far. Have a nice day ;-)
