Here is the link to the revised comp for my final project. http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/alist_comp4.png
Here is the link to the comp I turned in with my project profiler. http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/alist_comp2.png I revised the original layout in response to Ms. Schuster’s comments.
I’m a little late postingweek ten for a number of reasons.The biggest reason is that I chose to withdraw from the class. Although I was able to keep up with the reading; assignments; postings and projects – I wasn’t managing to show evidence of learning by actually passing the quizes.
Repetition and continuity are the name of the game in learning for me. I learn best by slowly building a foundation of understanding through experience. Jumping rapidly from one unfamiliar program to another, and from one new topic to another prevented me from cementing the information to the degree required to pass a “quiz”. I have a terrible memory and am not a careful reader, but normally intuition saves me. But intuition is built on experience and observation – so I was cooked from the get go with this class.
I plan to continue to attempt to learn how to build a website, and will live to post again!
Please stop by,
Ellen
I would have liked a good size list of examples of text and display fonts (common ones anyway). I guess you know the difference when you see it. I’ve been surprised more than once after enlarging a font – ranging from Wooops to Yuck.
My favorite part of this article was the banner ad at the bottom. It was exactly the size we discussed in class, and the simple changing text looked eminently duplicatable!
I am very interested in the topic of accessability and approached this article with interest, but soon realized that most of the technical (useful) specifics were over my head. The article did however highlight an area of disability that I hadn’t considered – colorblindness. Underlining links is so ugly that left to my own devices I would rely on color to differentiate. But after reading the article I wouldn’t make that choice. Bolding seems like a good option in conjunction with color. I filed the article for later reference. (52 bookmarked sites for this class and counting)
Animation. Wow does Fireworks make ugly example excercises (sorry to be negative).
In another good example of how doing excercises from a book is a tough way to learn – my star animated properly in Fireworks and previewed successfully in the browser. Back to the drawing board AGAIN to try (here in my lonely atlier) to get it to “GO” even though I followed the instructions…….or so I thought…..hmmmm at least it’s all basically fun, if frustrating at times……and what is my dog barking at now?
Initially I ran into a problem with one of the excercises in this chapter. I was trying to change the Box for h1, and left “Same for All” checked. As a result, only the top box was available for making changes, the rest were grayed out. I redid the excercize, and the second time around, had no problem.
My ongoing difficulty with tutorials, and excercises out of the book is that it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. I tend to get so caught up following the instructions (“fill in this or that box – without any real idea of why) that more often than not, I can successfully complete an excercize – without learning a thing! Arrgghhhh. Guess I’ll just flog on and hope it all comes together in the end.
(No pictures today, none of the excercises included saving as an instruction.)
The link to the excercises from Chapter 6:
http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/week9/
Chapter Summary: Control at a Price!
Wow, this chapter was packed with new concepts and vocabulary. It will take a few more reads/excercises and tons of real life experience before the nuances of Style Sheets are intuitive.
Highpoints:
Cascade – indicates hierarchy – for the Browser (vs. designer’s need for organization). Style sheets help the Browser determine in what order to honor styles.
Good News – Page Properties is easy to use, and easy to duplicate for alot of pages by taking the properties and bundling them together as a style sheet to apply in one swoop, great.
Tricky part – unfamiliar tag definitions that are not so easy to guess. “p” is easy, but “td” not so obvious.
So, what extactly does SEO Moz stand for ? The author suggests that SEO Moz is a great website name because it is so obvious. The notion struck me as funny because the name wasn’t even remotely obvious to me and therefore kind of an odd example to use for readers who need advice on choosing a domain name.
quote: “SEO” does a good job of explaining the industry we’re in and creating expectations, while “moz” gives a web association, and an association with being free, open, and community-driven.
The final article with links to domain name registration sites is a keeper. My current job is in print, but ironically, the Tuesday morning after class, my office mate was helping a print client register her domain name. It was great fun to see new found information put to use immediately.
One last thing, the first article in the Weekly Class Content Module was not available to read on Thursday when I tried to open it.
Other: While following links in the reading I came upon www.jackmorton.com – now there’s a hip, attractive website! This website made good use of changing images (which I usually find distracting when I’m trying to read). The images were small, and there weren’t a ton of them.
The Instructables site http://www.instructables.com/id/Creating-a-3D-effect-with-image-editing–software-/showing a Photoshop 3-D technique was also very neat.
Article: A Dao of Web Design
Seems fair that like print, design conventions on the web are a collection of (evolving) notions about how best to convey information to the most people, the measurement tools are a bit different, but why wouldn’t they be? Shedding points for percentages seems like it will be an easier transition than chucking inches for points. Discovering what the pleasing percentages are between body text and the heading, and using 1.5 the em size for the margins will likely become comfortable with time.
Designing for the most common denominator, or worst case scenario in terms of what the viewer might be using to see your creation seems like the safest course.
Final Project: A List Party Rental website
I chose this company for a couple of reasons. They’re new; they don’t like their logo; their website could use improvement; I have worked with them in the past (nice people) and I have access to photos and content for the website project. If I’m happy with the results at the end of the project, I would feel comfortable showing them the results. If I choose not to show them my efforts, at least I’ve had fun in the trying.
The link to my storyboard is: http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/FORGE_Storyboard.jpg, the link to the Fireworks comp is: http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/fogewebpage.png.zip or http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/128b/18/FOGEcomp.png
This excercize brought to light the difference between conceptualizing and doing. I put alot of thought into my storyboard, but still made changes that were not part of the original storyboard. At the end of the excercise, I was unsettled about the black hole of space to the right of the logo, but would have had to start from scratch, and I wasn’t sure the hole was THAT big a problem.
