Web Design Students
Millikin University

Elizabeth Richardson

http://www.dangerousbutterfly.com/

Learning response

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project proposal

For my project, I would like to re-design of the Dimensions website, and get it published on the Millikin site. It's current url is
http://www.geocities.com/mu_dimensions
but this site was never used or edited after it's initial creation. I would like to change it from a tables layout to a CSS layout, as well as use a new layout image entirely. The main goal of the site would be the create a new one that is more centered towards being updated once or twice a year, that is easy to pass on to a new webmaster each year. [Include a brief user-update guide.]

client project

Prairie Avenue Christian Church

http://students.millikin.edu/~DZaleski/christian_church/index.html

Diana Zaleski
Elizabeth Richardson
Kendra Brown

Prairie Avenue Christian Church Group Project

We have created a web design for the Prairie Avenue Christian Church that utilizes simplicity of design and ease of use.  We utilized symbols associated with the church and tried to tie in aspects of the church’s history. We strove for an overall aesthetic that not only the church’s patrons could easily identify with, but that the community would feel welcome to utilize. We did not want to detract from the general purpose of the page with too many images or colors. We decided on a consistent theme for each page using the same layout.

We added navigation to the top of the page, adding consistency to the web site. We tried to work within each page so that it would not necessitate scrolling on most monitors, adding to the overall aesthetic within the site. The text and photographs are kept confined within in tables making it very easy to change and update information. The index page shows an upcoming events calendar, however, it would be very easy to add or subtract the information on the site.

The main focus of our web design was to highlight the children’s clothing room that the church houses and runs. We created a separate design theme highlighting children’s clothing themes and tried to make the design playful and inviting. We also created pages outlining the church’s history, contact information, and provided a page to add links and photographs as needed.
We wanted the site to feature only the necessary information in order to keep it as useful and relevant as possible. We strove to create an web site that was not only pleasing to the eye, but easy to navigate and update. We also created a design that would be consistently modern and clean looking.

Hands On Training Tutorial Responses

Chapter 13

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Magazine Case Review

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Diana Zaleski
Elizabeth Richardson
Kendra Brown

Poetry Magazine Makeover Group Project

The Poetry Magazine Makeover Group Project web page design case provided our group with many opportunities to utilize our previously learned web design knowledge, as well as force us to grow within our own personal capabilities. The project has also provided our team with great creative and artistic opportunities. We were provided with text and graphic files and asked to create a website using these materials. It was a great opportunity to take existing materials and re-invent and re-tool its purpose and reach.

We came up with an overall artistic theme, and created personal and general goals. We decided to organize our web site around the Sumi-e paintings the magazine features on the front cover of each issue. We thought this somewhat minimal interpretation for the site would be fitting for the magazine; considering the basic attributes featured in a haiku poem. We wanted the site to thoroughly reflect the mission of the magazine.

This creative vision posed a few technical challenges our team had to work through. With the guidance of our webmaster, Elizabeth Richardson, we were able conquer these challenges and expand our web design abilities. We achieved all of the technical objectives posed for this case including creating html files with graphics, text and hypertext links within the pages and an overall web site aesthetic. We also succeeded in taking the given information and restructuring it for use in our web site.

We created individual pages for the magazine’s pertinent topics entitled: About, Submit, Subscribe and Contact. These pages each feature a different Sumi-e painting that we thought embodied the topic at hand. We tried to keep the site very clean looking, utilizing the white space to our advantage. The intended audience for this site is English language haiku enthusiasts, however, we tried to make the website accessible to the general public interested in haiku and Mayfly Magazine.

We strove to achieve an overall aesthetic that kept our readers and the magazine’s main concepts in mind. We designed our web site for ease of navigation, maximum information content, and visual appeal. With any group project working with others may commonly pose certain challenges; however, our team worked well together to achieve our desired goal.

Chapter 11

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Chapter 10

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bookmarks case

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 7

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resume critique

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Diana Zaleski's bookmarks case

Here is my review of Diana Zaleski's bookmarks case.

The orientation of the page is very straightforward and easy to grasp. The alignment is smooth and simple. Using horizontal rules to break up the space keeps the sections well organized. The annotations for the section “Public Domain Resources” seems cluttered and confusing; perhaps this is because the text extends completely across the screen. Indenting it beneath the bulleted list would also avoid breaking up the space in an unharmonious way. I would also suggest using color or a larger font size to make the titles of each section pop out more. Using bulleted lists was a good choice, as well. The main title shouldn’t be a link – where it would go isn’t very clear. If you want to have a link back, I’d put it in smaller text beneath the main title. The link to go back at the bottom of the page is also good enough not to necessarily need another one. I would also make the links a different color from the plain text. The colors chosen go well together; the text isn’t difficult to read. The navigation is nice and clean. Again, I’d make the top four links pop out a little more from the page. The International Computer Music Association link is broken, but other than that your linked sites seem well chosen, and you have a nice variety to choose from in most of the categories. The page is a nice job!

Chapter 6

I found this chapter boring, perhaps because we discuss the art of typography in an much more in depth manner in my design courses. It was mostly a how to, and I wasn’t very interested in the font tag attributes, having already known them as well as CSS. But a refresher is always good. The table selection made me so happy. I love using table designs but I hated coding them with html. They were always such a pain because of retyping font styles. The flash part was also new to me and interesting.

Link to interesting site:

Deviantart.com - This is the best art resource out there on the internet. Not because it showcases old masters, or contemporaries who are admired by the ‘higher’ art community, but because it brings together what people are doing here and now, from so many ranges of tastes, styles, and levels of talent. It unites artist in friendship, allows for comments and discusses, and has been fostered primarily as a communication tool to help art grow. While there are other similarly large art galleries, such as elfwood.com and epiloge.net, these two focus on fantasy and science fiction art, while Deviantart allows for many different mediums and styles, and - most importantly - organizes them so well, in a way that lets you browse to either more talented and experienced artists, or newer, younger artists.

September 18, 2006
DeviantArt

A community site for visual artist of many styles, deviant art is well organized, and brings together thousands of artists. Because of this, it faces the challenge of displaying a huge amount of information to the user. It does this by first keeping the design very simple and clean, while still unique. The pages are unified in a simple gray design, with a very simple grid structure. It’s standard navigation is set at the very top, for every page. Once a user enters an artists page, then navigation around that page becomes specific to that artist. Any advertisements are out of the way to the right side, and these are usually announcements by Deviantart or other relevant art links to contemporary video games and movies, never annoying or noisy adds like some sites.

The very first page greets the viewer with four main choices to look at: newest, popular, prints, and daily deviations (the staffs picks of the day). Newest allows for any artist a change to have there work displayed (if only for a short time, as work is always being uploaded to the site). Popular allows for more quality but still a very broad scope of work. Prints are usually the best quality work, as these are for sale, and Deviantart charges for turning your files to prints. Daily deviations also reaches the higher quality art, and the staff makes the attempt to choose a wide variety of mediums.

The top navigation allows for “browse”, which automatically goes to the most popular deviations in the most popular categories. These include ‘fantasy’, ‘people’, ‘anime’, ‘photography’, ‘landscapes’, and many more. The page only displays 24 at a time, but searching the site or choosing the specific category you want is very easy.

Once you choose a piece of artwork or ‘deviation’, you enter that images page, which has comments from other users, information on the medium and techniques used, and usually a description from the artist. You can choose to view the larger file, if you decide you want to see the details. This feature if very helpful for larger sized digital paintings that are meant to be observed smaller, but also have beautiful detailing when zoomed in.

From this page, you can visit the artists main page, with their favorite picks, their friends, their journal, their profile, and much more. This leads to the content of Deviantart – which is mainly a way to link artists and artworks together, by category or by taste and friendship. It is impossible to load deviantart.com and not be inspired as an artist, or find something new and refreshing.

Writing Space, Chapter One

Any form of communication - be it oral, written texts, digital media, music, art, etc - does not necessarily have to compete with other forms. Should we focus instead on how our vast heritage of human communication combines (rather than competes) to form a unified whole, allowing for multiple, if not endless, expressions and resulting interpretations. Why focus on how they compete or make each other obsolete? All major forms of communications, of which published work I believe is one, don’t get discarded, but instead transformed into a form more relevant for the society it exists in. Why not focus on how web and print compliment and combine with one another, as perhaps orality and the written word combined?

Chapter 5

In chapter five, the point to file annoyed me. I like browsing files the old fashioned way. Place holders are great though. WYSIWYG editors lend so much to design capabilities; coding consists so much of ‘guess and check’ that a lot of attention is just given to coding it correctly, rather than composing the design correctly.

That it remembers your link history is also wonderful. The program frees up so much type that used to be wasted on repetitive typing. The email link pop up, as well as the named anchor pop up box, seemed like a waste of time. It would be faster just to type it by hand in the text box already up on the toolbar. The image map makes me very happy - I never tried to learn how to code one, because they were so confusing. Now it’s easy.

Chapter 4

Although Macs still feel confusing to use, the Dreamweaver interface seems very user friendly. I found using it very easy. I enjoy how the book’s writers seem very knowledgeable about both design and computer science; perhaps this is because there are two authors. Using the program feels very comfortable. I like it much better than front page. I have always been wearing of WYSIWYG editors, but Dreamweaver doesn’t mess up the code. It’s so nice to see code being creating neatly and quickly in split mode. I don’t know if I’ll enjoy hand coding as much any more, now that I know an easier way.