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Paper: crucial to Web design
At first thought, Web design is a digital job. But as long as I have done this work, I’ve had paper on hand. In the 90s I’d quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each…
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Let’s stop playing Frankenstein
Consider the monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The creature is described as being about eight feet (244 centimeters) in height, with translucent yellowish skin that “barely disguised the workings of the vessels and muscles underneath”, watery, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, black lips, and white teeth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Appearance) I read that phrase describing the skin of…
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Perspective: Websites are fleeting.
I was glancing through some files in some webspace I’ve had for a while, and ran across a fairly old portfolio page I had. It listed seven websites that I had worked on around that time. This was probably about seven years ago, so sometime in 2001 or so. Not only is there not a…
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Perspective 2 Studio is hopping!
This past summer my friend Adam (of Envision Internet Consulting) and I worked with Lynne Brown and Matt Schulert of MediaGraphics, Inc. on a website for an exciting concept of Lynne’s, called Perspective2. The idea was to create a studio space for the artists and producers in the area, and, wow, has it taken off!…
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Design connections
A couple days ago I stopped into the Com Arts building at Michigan State University to meet a new professor in the journalism program named Karl Gude. [Karl’s blog] I heard about Karl from my friend and colleague Liz Weber who handed me a clipping from the MSU News Bulletin which explained that Karl had…
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Restricting search indexing to sections of a web page
If you think about websites as having different page types, with each page type having different sections within it, such as content sections, navigation sections, and footer sections, it becomes apparent that the value of a particular page is defined by the content on the page that is unique to that page. Sections like footers…
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New Ph.D. program site at MSU College of Education
A day or so ago, Adam of Envision Internet Consulting released a new website for a graduate program in Education at Michigan State University. The program is the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy Ph.D. Program at the MSU College of Education. The new site took a lot of work and I think it looks great.…
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Sunflower design
My coworker, Anne Hunt, just redesigned her personal Web site. I think it looks great. It is very summery. Check it out.
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Change in web design is emerging, again
There is a new kid on the block, and her name is “I’ve never designed with a table in my career.” To her, our old ways often seem strange and confining, and it is within this generation that we will most likely see more departures from what design conventions have emerged in the past decade.Thinking…
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Phi, phi, design notes
Just for the sake of me jotting this down somewhere… Phi (the golden ratio) is approximately equal to 1.6180339887498948482. phi is the decimal part of that: .6180339887498948482. When laying out two column widths on a web page, using phi as the percentage of the wider column often provides a nice visual balance. So, two columns…