Web Multimedia

Nowadays, the majority of internet sites are examples of web multimedia, since it is hard to find one that does not include a combination of text, pictures, music and video, if not all of them at once. Even though multimedia can be found in other formats, such as books and films to name a couple, the world wide web has arguably become the one global medium, and therefore it is web multimedia that is available to the vast majority of people. While the final product may seem to seamlessly blend together, or at least that would be the ideal, the fact is that each type of media is stored in different media files, with particular file extensions to differentiate one from the other. For instance, file extensions such as .htm or .html indicate that the file is an HTML page; an .xml extension is used for an XML file; and the .css extension for style sheets. Picture formats are classified under extensions like .gif and .jpg.

Web multimedia design is the discipline that involves mastery of all these media formats so that they make up a coherent whole. Web multimedia designers must be proficient in the handling of audio, video, still images, animation, physical objects, text, soundtracks and digital data. In order to gain the know how to juggle all those elements, multimedia designers should take courses that deal with story boarding, retouching, compositing, flash animation, site design, video and sound editing, motion graphics production and user interface design. Once they have finished their education, designers can hold positions such as scriptwriters for multimedia, web designers, multimedia producers, computer based training designers or web script language developers; and ply their trade in fields like education, movies, television, advertising and of course on the world wide web, among many more opportunities.