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.

week 4

This week we had a couple of assignments to work on. We read about grids in design and redesigned the page that we had been working on, but by applying an underlying grid to the layout. I liked playing with the CSS to get different results but have run into some difficulties. I'd like to be able to set up a 2-column page that is fluid to fit around whatever content you include. The smallest column would govern the size of the other column and then the larger column would have a slider for the remainder of the content. However, I wanted to stay away from fixed sizes so that you would have a template that would wrap around your content with minimal editing. It appears that you have to have a fixed size for this but I am looking further into this.

I've also begun work on an assignment to submit a CSS sheet to CSS ZenGarden as a mid-term assignment. This will be a difficult assignment that I'm curious how I'll do on it. I've started by looking at some of the samples that have been accepted already to get a base idea of how to approach my proposal. The plan is to have some fun with it even though this will be the most difficult assignment to date.

On a personal note, I'm just back from vacation and had a GREAT time!

week 3

This week's assignment made a little more sense than last week's. We are focusing on semantic naming conventions as well as semantic markups, to make your code and page(s) descriptive for both users and machines as well. As readers and such work through a page, certain decisions are made depending on what the reader/user encounters.

The homework over this last week had us completing a site redesign, create a tutorial to describe the CSS Box Model, and utilize semantic naming for our CSS to allow us to do an exercise where we swap style sheets with other students. This worked well as long as the other students followed the same naming conventions. This exercise is very similar to what CSS ZenGarden allows. This was cool as first it worked. It was also cool because it was a visual example of the many different ways that there are to achieve a desired goal. The CSS pages that I tested with my site were all successful and also made the page appear very differently, while keeping the content and necessary elements readable and displaying in the right order.

I figured out that "position absolute" can be utilized with "float" to force the alignment of elements in my page. I had previously had a problem with the visual elements gradually forcing themselves out of whack.

One of the things that I enjoyed from this week's class is that we saw various examples of how other people designed their pages and even more so their navigation. The different options for navigation are very exciting as now I'm learning to create nav that is minimal (code-wise) and loads very quickly for a user. Also, since we aren't using images text readers or PDAs can view the page with less trouble.

Another topic covered was "compound xhtml". This basically means that you can start grouping elements within elements and they all have a dependency to each other. You have "parent" elements, "child elements", and even "sibling elements".

The first week's assignment was pretty difficult. We had to redesign an already created web page that made use of tables, even for non-statistical data. I've gone and changed these tables to DIVs but am having a problem with formatting. Each subsequent DIV pushed a little further out of alignment, causing all data to eventually shift over. Another issue that I encountered was with the header, or branding, section of the page. The colored bar pushes up instead of staying in a static position.

The first roadblock that I ran into was getting the colored boxes to position correctly, and that was finally accomplished by using the "float" property. I needed to create a small box for text, then a small divider, and then finally a larger box of the same height but whose width goes to the end of the page. Quite frustrating until I came across the "float" property. From there I was able to create the correct DIVs for the content, but that is when I ran into the issue of the formatting progressively pushing further out of alignment.

After seeing some examples from a couple of other students I think there are some things that I can change to try and address this formatting. My feelings are that once I can force everything to align correctly the remainder of the page should be fairly simple to finish off.

My plan of attack on this is to get the page displaying as I would like, clean up the code (and try to keep as small as possible), and then finally validating to XHTML strict standards. I feel like I understand how CSS works but now need to learn the finer details that will allow me to force the page to display exactly as I'm intending.

Day 1

I've started this blog as a requirement for my Intermediate Web Design class. My very first concern would be the continued development of my CSS skills and then I would be interested in growing my skills in multimedia elements to be incorporated into my sites.