I chose to look further into the reviews of the Kindle Fire to then compare to the possibilities of the iPad 3. To begin with, there is an incredibly size difference for the two pieces of technology, with the Fire having a seven inch display and the current iPad is 9.7 inches, putting these two gadgets in different weight classes right from the start. The Kindle Fire has a dual core processing system making it more powerful than the single core Nook Color, while the iPad is rumored to have an A6 Quad-core processor, giving it a huge edge on the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire, being supported by Amazon has access to multiple forms of media, such as Magazines, Books, Audio Books, and Music among other things. The device is budgeted at $199 making it an affordable alternative to the emerging tablet trend, but also means that there are no premium features such as 3G wireless, cameras, microphones, and GPS. In conjunction with that, the Kindle Fire sports only 8GB of memory, which is plenty when considering books, but when movies and Netflix and web browsing are brought into the mix, it makes the allotted amount of space seem much smaller. The bottom line is that for an affordable price, almost anyone can afford a Kindle Fire if what they are looking for is great entertainment value that prizes simplicity over complicated techno features.

The iPad 3 has a plethora of features including their new retina display which packs more pixels into the space allotted and makes everything look smoother. The iPad 3 sports cloud computing compatibility making photos, apps, calendars, and songs available anywhere internet access can be reached. An added aesthetic feature that is being introduced is the fingerprint proof technology, which is rumored to be mid patent for apple. The iPad 3 will come with an improved camera with experts speculating that it will be a 5MP camera with 1080p video recording quality of sixty frames per second. There is also rumors of Apple introducing OS X Lion for the tablet because of its quad core processor.

Overall, the Kindle Fire is geared towards individuals with basic needs, such as viewing media and light web surfing, whereas the iPad 3 is more comparable to a laptop in a tablet form. The Kindle Fire may in fact put a slight dent in the iPad’s sales unless it is more competitively priced, but the customers who are buying the Fire may not have spent money on the iPad in the first place. The iPad will be useful for professionals, and people who need to have a lot of information available to them all the time, whereas the Kindle Fire will be more of a bridge between eReaders and basic tablets.

iPad 3 Review:

http://www.thetechlabs.com/tech-news/ipad-3-features/

Amazon Kindle Fire Review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/amazon-kindle-fire/4505-3126_7-35022491.html

For my website I wanted to use a lot of my own illustration to set the stage and define each page.  My home page represents a lifestyle that myself, as a musician, lives from day to day. The birdie is my own signature or representation of myself I guess you could say…more like a logo than anything else though. You will see him on every page. I used a pastel color palette of yellow and blue. The inspiration of color came from my purse actually…modern, yet very natural and organic. I think overall my website is a pretty good reflection of me as a person.

Here is the home page:

For my band site (Backslash) I chose to stick to a tan and muted black theme with occasional highlights in turquoise. I wanted to give my sight a kind of retro/rock feel and using the font Santa Fe Std for all the headers and page links really helps with that. My body text will be in an Arial font because I wanted to keep a clean feel to the page and sans serif fonts tend to feel more modern and uncluttered to me.

My imagery will all be in black and white, to contribute to the simplified retro feel. I broke this rule for the album covers though, as I did not feel I would be able to effectively represent them in black and white. For my actual imagery, I am also adjusting the brightness/contrast to make them look even more crisp.

So far I think that my site is coming along very well. I finally got the hang of how to actually make and manage my layer comps, which for me, was the most difficult part of the entire project. After midpoint critique, I still have a lot to work on in terms of the design of the site and how it will flow. My goal is a sophisticated, yet young, fun, and funky site that people can take seriously, yet have fun with.

I chose what to me seems like the one of the most sophisticated typefaces, Helvetica Neue. Its clean and crisp lines and smooth curvature just bring a certain level of class and elegance to every work that it is incorporated into.

In terms of imagery, I want to use really fun, loud pictures that make the user excited to hear what kind of music we put out. At first, I had a canvas background on the site, but after further development of the page, I decided to keep the page as a crisp black with white splatter brush strokes on the background.

Overall, though I am a little stressed about getting the project done the right way, I am excited about the final outcome.

P.S. The image posted is not the most current version of the page, but is pretty accurate in its depiction of where the project is heading.

In my website, I decided to go with a color palette of browns including black and white and incorporated the inverses rectangle shape for the header to imply that its a Rock band. I think this sets the tone of what type of band I’m going for, I felt because the texture of my background gives it that rock band feel. With the type choice I went with I have the titles of everything serifs and and main nav and body text is San serifs. With the titles I have with serifs, I think it gives it the feel of the type of band I have and I made the body San serifs because I thought it was easier for the viewer to read. With my imagery, I’m thinking of making my photos black and white because it will give it that classic feel I’m looking for, but I also will explore with color and see if that could be an option as well.

I’m using my friends as the members of the band “F.N.C.”, don’t ask me what it means because I don’t know either. I’m going for an alternative, Indy group. For my background I used a cropped section of a old picture, for a setting that was grungy and city-like. I posterized it and over-saturated the colors so it looked wild and unnatural. I added the groups’ name to make it look spray painted on the wall.

I’m keeping the same photo for all pages.