Monday, January 17, 2011

Welcome to the 2011 SP Web Design class -- Assignment #1

Welcome to the blog for the web design class.

You have a two-part assignment to complete before next class, on Thursday.

Make a post on this blog. You should: a) write a short paragraph about yourself, b) include a picture of yourself, and c) provide a link to a website that you like or visit often. Be prepared, next class, to talk about why you like the website for a presentation of five to ten minutes. Talk about:

1. The design of the site

You should be able to describe the use of:
a) color
b) fonts
c) images
d) the general layout

How do each of these elements serve (or undermine) the purpose and content of the website? What is the emotional or design quality of each of these elements? For instance, a site designed for children might use colors that are bright, vivid, and friendly -- with a font that appears playful or toy-like.

2. The navigation of the site

How it the site organized? How do you get from place to place? Is the content on the site easily accessible? Are there different navigation schemes on different parts of the site, or is it consistent across the site?

3. The functionality of the site -- what the site "does."

Also, if you have a website of you own, post a link to that as well.

And don't forget -- I highly recommend you order the book "Visual Quickstart Guide to Dreamweaver CS5," online.

Finally -- if you'd like to download a copy of the syllabus, it's here:
http://www.box.net/shared/9yzxoerfet

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

HILARY

I live in Incline and have just joined the class. I like to write songs, and you can listen to one on Myspace. My favorite site is Google. I like the minimalist design of the opening page and how the thing I want most – the search box – is laid out directly in my line of sight. There’s not much navigation unless I want a specialty search from the top bar, so the site is fast to use. The clues to click the choices for a specialty search are a blue color and underline. I like the creative variations of the Google logo. Without those variations, the logo would become an in-your-face bore. The logo adds an accent of color to the non-distracting white background and plain typeface (which looks like a variation of Arial). Google keeps its homepage clean and classy by not having ads on it, but it loads other pages with ads.