Adventures in Web Design: CAT274

Website Complete!

internetblake — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:26:03 +0000

I’ve completed my website for cat274. It can be viewed at:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/website/index.html

or at my own, much easier-to-remember domain:

http://www.blakelarsonphoto.com

Overall, I’m pleased with the final product. Still a few design issues I’d like to iron out, but they’re not a big deal. The optimization also needs to be looked at. I don’t recall sRGB colorspace murdering my gradients and saturation like this last time I optimized my work for the web.

OLA Build Final

internetblake — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:41:48 +0000

Just finished up the OLA build and I’m about to test it out in browsershots. Looks good on my macbook in Firefox, Safari and Opera. Here are the pages. The links are all set up, so you should be able to navigate from page to page just fine, but I’ll post direct links to all four pages here, just in case.

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/aacc_ola_comp/ola/ola-home.html

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/aacc_ola_comp/ola/ola-classes.html

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/aacc_ola_comp/ola/ola-links.html

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/aacc_ola_comp/ola/ola-tutoring.html

EDIT: Leave it to microsoft to ruin everything. After checking browsershots, everything looks great except for the IE 5.5 and 6.0 versions.

OLA Buildout + Reading

internetblake — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:26:22 +0000

My OLA buildout is up here:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/aacc_ola_comp/ola/ola-home.html

overall, I’m pretty pleased with it so far. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to implement the horizontal rules, and properly formatting the professor information in the sidebar is proving to be something of a challenge. I have to hand-code the header tag to keep all of the text in the sidebar from switching to a header, and when i do, it spaces out the header from the rest of the text a lot more than I’d like. I’m impressed with how well the DIVs worked out though. I think I’m getting a hang of this.

The reading this week involves CSS as well. I have to say, though that I don’t think any of the reading was nearly as informative as one trip to the CSS Zen Garden. It’s really impressive to see CSS in action at the hands of professionals. I’ve been looking at all of the different layouts and trying to figure out how they set up their DIVs and how they kept their spacing consistent.

The CSS Zen Garden can be found at:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Week 11 – Building the digitalJENN design

internetblake — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:30:10 +0000

I have completed the digitalJENN buildout exercise and I feel like still have a few loose ends to tie up. My work can be viewed here:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/week11/digitalJENN-start.html

As can be seen in the above link, while most of the design tranferred pretty well to the web, my footer is lacking any color and my navbar doesn’t extend with the pageContent div. I double and triple checked my #footer ID, and the information for the background and text color is definitely there. The text is the right size too. But for whatever reason it’s not displaying the colors. I’m sure that this is my error, and I look forward to finding out how to rectify it in class this week.

This exercise gave me the interaction with CSS that I’ve been looking for, and I really enjoyed it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot just by working through this tutorial assignment. Now to tackle the OLA design and see what I’ve really learned.

Week 10 In-Class Assignment

internetblake — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:10:06 +0000

Just finished up the in class assignment for week 10. In a lot of ways Fireworks is a brilliant program. In a lot of other ways, it’s incredibly unintuitive. Why is the default to resize the canvas on all pages? What is it exactly that smartguides keep trying to align to? Why include the hand tool at all if I can’t move the document around the workspace?

Anyway, I finished it, and the master page function makes things a lot easier than if I had comped in photoshop and then pieced it out by hand and stuck it into dreamweaver. I’m still not sold on this program though.

Website Design Comps

internetblake — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:17:39 +0000

Here are the design comps for my website. I’m leaning towards number 1, but i wanted to get the second in there mainly for a different layout. color suggestions would be very helpful. I like the saturated black sort of color in layout 1, but I’m not totally sold on the blue.

without further adieu:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/projectprofiler/samplelayout-01.jpg

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/projectprofiler/samplelayout_2-01.jpg

OLA Comp

internetblake — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:33:32 +0000

I’ve been a bit remiss in updating my blog over spring break. Here’s my comp for the OLA assignment. I think it turned out alright. Whether or not I can make it in Dreamweaver is another question.

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/AACC_comp-01.jpg

Art of Women Showcase Banner

internetblake — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:02:44 +0000

Just completed my work on the Art of Women Showcase banner design. I decided to attempt to animate the banner in Fireworks because my copy of Photoshop is CS2, and the Fireworks trial is a lot smaller file than the Photoshop trial. How hard could it be, right? The answer is more difficult than I was expecting, but not too difficult for me to figure it out. The tweening proved to be especially challenging. I ended up just manually applying the motion blur because the Fireworks tweening tool kept giving me an error message that I couldn’t make sense of. I think I need to do some more work in Fireworks to familiarize myself with it.

Anyway, here’s a link to my banner:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/artofwomenbanner.gif

Week 7 Exercise

internetblake — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:12:43 +0000

In Week 7, we learned to animate GIFs in Photoshop. It’s nice that Photoshop now allows you to take care of that within the program. The way that ImageReady was integrated into CS2 was really obnoxious. You’d have to do raster work in Photoshop, and then if you wanted to export it for web use or do anything web-savvy, all of the best tools were in ImageReady. You’d celebrate 2 or 3 birthdays while you waited for your content to load in ImageReady, and if you decided that your image needed any changing, you could either wait for the import back to Photoshop or work with the graphics technology equivalent of a large rock. Fireworks seems to be a much more redundant program than ImageReady, but I think I’d prefer redundancy to overly-specific programs.

Tangent aside, Here’s my gif. Seeing photos rendered in GIF generally turns my stomach, but this one isn’t too bad.

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/week7/anim.gif

Week 7 Exercise

internetblake — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:02:15 +0000

Tangent aside, Here’s my gif. Seeing photos rendered in GIF generally turns my stomach, but this one isn’t too bad.

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/cat/cat13/week7/anim.gif