Ryder Ripps
Ryder Ripps is a New York native web artist that comes from a family of artists (wikipedia.org). He is the founder of sites that include Internet Archaeology and the surfing company Dump.fm and has a portfolio of miscellaneous GIFs that are sure to make you second guess your desire to visit his sites. According to flavorwire.com, he also works in affiliation with OKFocus, working on a project titled Draw With Your Face.
The piece above is a GIF from Internet Archaeology, a "tribute" to GeoCities from Yahoo! before it was closed. A lot of the GIFs and other moving images that Ripps uses are very simple in design, often pixelated (or just low quality), and branch to a variety of themes and genres. I liked this one in particular because cats are awesome! This next one is kinda comical...
Ripps also, on his portfolio site, ryder-ripps.com, has links to experiential sites, some of which are very strange, in my opinion. One of these I found fascinating, but only to a short end. The site http://ryder-ripps.com/mars/ brings you to a Google Maps style image where the user can navigate a 3D image of a pharmacy, much like one can place the little walking man on certain streets and get the first-person perspective of the area. This particular work was creative but lacked that extra dimension. Navigating the store was limited to about 4 different spots within the store and two spots outside of the store by the street. By clicking and dragging the image, the user could "look around" the storefront and see products in the store and buildings in the area. I found this interesting to have as artwork, since Google Maps and Earth are the only places I have seen this style used.
To say the least about Ripps' portfolio site, it is very simple and easy to maneuver within. All headers for his works are to the left side and clicking on one of the headers takes you to the piece. This makes navigation very easy; however, there is a very unappealing blank, white space to the right of the home page. Adding a small list of images from a category or some productive use of this space, I feel, would make his work more respectable. In terms of his other sites, like Internet Archaeology, the layout is slightly more complex, but just as easy to navigate. Each header on the side for works drops down to show categories, then each category has a quick navigation to any individual work either by clicking the viewed image or the image you want to look at at the bottom of the page.
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