final week

finally there! This is the last week of class and then we get a short break until the next quarter starts. Today we'll present our final project and I'm hopeful it is sufficient. It has come down to the wire but I think that everything will be ready. I like the RSS feeds that were set up for it and I think that the content is a good start. I wrote several reviews and also provided some links and descriptions that I feel were pretty good. There was a review of Chrome (the new google browser) that I liked. Curious how popular that one will become! I do wish that there was more content but it has some good information to start. We will also be taking a final exam that I don't feel ready for at all. At this point though I'll just do what I can. Unfortunately, my brain doesn't feel fully functional today. Oh well!

coming into the last week

I'm entering the final week of this quarter. I've enjoyed the classes but am ready to move on to the next set. I'll be taking creative writing, digital illustration, and production planning. For this quarter, I'm pleased with the final projects that I've put together or been involved in. My digital sound editing project came out really well and was a lot of fun putting together. In my web design class, I think our group project is strong and if our elements work correctly together we'll be in good shape. There will be some viewers other than our class (faculty and such) in there so that adds some pressure. Great idea though and our design, logo and associated pieces fit nicely. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the redesign of my school web site. It is located at http://pdm373.aisites.com/ and took me quite a while, even though it looks fairly simple. I like the flexibility of it and the way that I grow or shrink it very easily, as needed. A pretty good start. Now I just need to learn more about the multimedia elements so that I can begin to incorporate those.

getting closer!

This last week has been very busy. We're wrapping up our group project and I finished my home page redesign as well (http://pdm373.aisites.com/) as we get near the end of the Summer session at school. The group project is called "Don't Get Frank'd, Inc." and is a resource page for web design students. It has been an interesting experience, in my opinion it went about as expected for a group project in school. I understand the intent in that people will work as part of a team out in the world but it is hard to make it a direct tie-in as people seem to approach work assignments differently than school assignments. I think we have some very talented people in our group though so expect that the final product will be worthwhile. We will have a group reviewing the project next week though so hopefully all is worked out prior to that. I contributed reviews for Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, and Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. I also came up with the contracts, asset lists, and user testing.

I really enjoyed my redesign. It took a lot of time and work but I think it came out really well. I went with a simple-appearing design that is flexible and can be grown or shrunk as needed. Text, images, nav, and etc all resize and stay in proportion for viewers that need to increase/decrease for readability. All pages validate for strict xhtml and my css validates as well. I learned a lot from this assignment and enjoyed it more than the css zengarden assignment that we had earlier this quarter. The hardest part of the redesign was getting navigation to resize correctly. This was solved by using "ems" and that gave me that extra flexibility that I needed.

getting to the end

we just have a few weeks of class left at this point. We've started playing with Adobe Captivate today and that seems to have a lot of potential. Using it to create tutorials is pretty handy, just have to get used to editing the individual frames and how to customize them as needed. I did a sample photoshop tutorial (nothing fancy, just playing with the program)and I can think of many possibilities.

we also are finishing up with our final projects. If they are as effective as we hope there may be hosting space available to allow the site to remain up-and-running. Maybe this will encourage a little more involvement as this site/project can be an actual resource for people.

there is some talk about using Captivate to create a tutorial for our final instead of a written test. I personally would prefer the written test as I feel we won't have sufficient time to play with Captivate to allow you to design a good, useful tutorial. As we are finishing up our final group project it will most likely be difficult to teach yourself Captivate during the same time.

this week

This week I've worked on a variety of things. I had my assignment to do some reviews of both photoshop and dreamweaver (cs3)and that was fun. This was for a final group project where we are creating a site that will be a resource to other web design students. Another project I undertook was to continue redesigning my homepage. The big obstacle that is now out of the way is creating navigation that resizes with the text around it while staying in proportion. That is working correctly, now I need to integrate it and give more appropriate colors. I felt pretty pleased with how it came out. Now just to flesh out the individual pages. I'll be setting up a photo page as one of my next goals.

On a personal note I saw the greatest show today. It was performed by School of Rock here in SF. This was a bunch of kids (10-15 years old?) doing a tribute to Black Sabbath. They played at the Makeout Room in the Mission and I brought my two sons, nephew, and a fried of theirs. We had a great time, how often can kids hang in a packed bar and watch other kids rock out to Paranoid with their parents? Only in SF!!!

CSS Zen Garden project

I have finished my csszengarden assignment and have submitted it to the site for acceptance/rejection. I had a lot of fun with this assignment but it was a bit frustrating as well. The formatting was my biggest issue but I feel that I've made some positive strides in that area. What I liked is that I went with a less "zen-like" design and went for the more "in-your-face" design. I used a graffiti theme and played around with different designs in that area. My first attempt was a brick wall with painted content, but the brick wall was too overwhelming. I then broke the wall into pieces and that worked much better visually. I adjusted images and such to keep them small and the page loads quickly. It also validates. This may have been the assignment that I feel I learned the most from, but it also made me realize how much I have to learn. There were some GREAT designs submitted in my class that shows even more clearly the power of understanding CSS as well as knowing how to apply it to make a page do exactly what you are looking for. We are now working on a group project that is targeted towards other AI students and then later can be used by the public at large, if they were so inclined. I'll be adding more on that once we have made additional progress.

week 5

have continued working on csszengarden submission. It has been fun playing with but a ton of work. Even creating the images was a bit time consuming. However, I'm happy with the idea that I came up with and am now working on actual structure. The page is almost ready and I'll be posting again upon completion.