Unpaid Favors

There is one big thing that designers need to make it in the graphic and digital arts careers, and that is motivation. Above is an illustration and some examples of tasks you might be asked to do by friends, or co-workers where you will be spending hours designing but probably won't get paid for. This is one down fall for this field. If your jobless typically companies want to see a portfolio but if you havent done anything its hard to look good to the employer, so most of the time you'll have to do unpaid tasks. But just know that everything that you do can be used in your portfolio and can greater your chance of getting the job your wanting.

clients from hell "feelings and opinions page"

CLIENT: “The word ‘Blog’ sounds too alien. (Does an impression with his arms)’Glip glorp zoop blog, I am a martian’, if you know what I mean.”

ME: “Um, I guess I do, sure.”

CLIENT: “There’s no humanity in it! I want people to associate our company with humanness.”

ME: “So you want to remove the blog page?”

CLIENT: “No, keep it. But can we call it our ‘feelings and opinions space’ instead?”

ME: “Sure. The only thing is, it’s on a ‘blogspot’ subdomain.”

CLIENT: “Just change that to a ‘feelingsandopinionsspot’, sub-dome-whatever. Easy, see? You just have to start thinking like me!”

ME: “…”

PHP for Beginners

 A few weeks ago I posted a link to some more information on PHP, but honestly I am still really confused.  I’m finally starting to grasp HTML and CSS, so this PHP thing is still confusing to me.  I ran across this link recently and I haven’t had much time to look through it, but it seems to lay out some beginner tips and tutorials to learning PHP.  What might be useful are the mail scripts and registration pages.  This might be helpful when we are trying to make our contact pages for our websites.

http://www.wokay.com/technology/10-php-tutorials-for-beginners-tips-tricks-55986.html

Julie 

JQuery stuff- helpful for our sites because we have to come up with the best solution to display our work. This is one that may be helpful...

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/css/fresh-jquery-image-gallery-display-solutions/

This article talks about whats important when thinking about interactive deisgn. Its important to keep in mind that its different from other kinds of design. There are a few foundation points that they'd have you keep in mind: time, metaphor, negative space and the intersection in interaction.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/foundations-of

Things that employers don't like to see

http://blog.inkd.com/designers/60-things-about-design-portfolios-that-infuriate-employers"

This site is useful in seeing what potential employers don't like to see in an online portfolio. Since there are so many different opportunities to make a portfolio unique, i found it easier to check out what I shouldnt do, and go from there.

Color Palate Finder

 One way to go about picking colors from an existing site is to bring a screenshot into Photoshop and determine the colors from there.  While seeking out neat online web tools, I ran across this site which figures out an existing website’s color palates for you.  There are a couple different ways to go about using the site, but the easiest way I found was to scroll down the page until you get to an empty box where you can type in the website or copy and paste the URL.  It then comes up with all the numbers of the colors.

http://wearepandr.com/  

Julie

week13-photos

This week I’ve got a site that should hopefully be helpful on our final portfolio project. If you’re searching for creative ways to show images of your work in a gallery or otherwise, this could be an instructive site. Some of the examples use flash but there are others that don’t, which we could use.

Hope you find this helpful

http://www.ahmadhania.com/2007/12/impressive-ways-to-display-pictures-and.html

Useful Web Interfaces

Thought this would be a useful site to maybe help us along!

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/12/10-useful-web-application-interface-techniques/

Using any font on your Website

I read this article because I was really hoping to be able to use some of my own fonts on my portfolio website. It was helpful because it opens the door to using all of the ttf fonts out there rather than just being limited to google's. I'm guessing it'll make your page load slower but it may be worth it to get the perfect look for your site.

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-chrome-extensions-for-web-design-students/#more-4390

A very useful list of tools that us web designers can use. I know some people have problems when your site changes from different screen sizes. The Window Resizer tool would be really helpful. Also, I think the Stay Focus tool is a really neat idea and would be very helpful for all of us.

The Story of the Elephant

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-psychologists-view-of-ux-design

This article is one written by a psychologist about how you have to approach user experience. He uses the story of the elephant in the dark room to explain how each person who touches the elephant experienced it differently. You have to use this approach when you design a web site. This article breaks down the psychological aspects that you have to take into account.

Design Hell

I thought that this was kind of funny. As designers we should try to control things as much as possible. Depending on what we're working on, many people may have vested interest in it.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Closing Tags

Html can be a pain sometimes when coding for giant sites, but its important to put closing tags for everything otherwise the site won't function the way you are trying to get it to work. The worst part is when something goes wrong and its because of one missing closing tag, and having to go through all the code to look for the one missing tag can be time consuming and stressful. But when all tags are accounted for then the site can function to its full potential.

PHP Templating

As usual, I typically try to find articles that are relevant to what we have recently learned in class.  On Monday we learned a bit about PHP, but I still found it rather confusing.  By the end of the lesson it started to make sense that PHP is useful to save time from not making a hundred different HTML and CSS files.  Then I found this article which goes into a bit more depth on that very subject.  It also notes that using PHP is cheaper and easier for a client to maintain.  This article confuses me a little when it gets to the templates at the bottom since I’m not super clear about how PHP works entirely, but overall this gave me a better idea of what it is.

http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/17/getting-started-with-php-templating/

Julie 

Portfolio tips

Some tips in creating good online portfolios. This site shows some downfalls in designing online portfolios and helps you know what to avoid as well as what to do to help!

Hope it's helpful!

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/04/creating-a-successful-online-portfolio/

portfolio ideas

Hey all!

The post for this week is in relation to the project we're currently working on. It's a site with examples of some portfolio sites from other people, just to see what others have done and to build on it. Hope it's helpful

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/freelance-portfolios/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/10/dos-and-donts-of-call-to-action-pages/

an article on the do's and dont's of call to action pages.

Why I am a Designer

Everyone has there own reasons why they are a designer. But whatever the reason the one thing to make sure is that you do it because you love it. Having the love for design can give you the strive to learn and improve the design throughout the world. Design changes everyday and more and more mediums are being created that need to be designed and it takes motivated people to bring the world to the new designs.

Pros and Cons of Frameworks

Within the past month or so in class we've looked at different frameworks and how we can use them in our sites. Here is an article that talks about some of the pros and cons of using frameworks and then lists a lot of different javascript and css frameworks.

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/pros-cons-frameworks/

USB fun

also this:

Found a simple site from this guy Brian Hoff. I liked the color scheme, and the layout, I just thought I'd share this since we're starting to look at what is out there and what we want to do.

week 11

I thought this website provided some good information for our portfolio sites. It's cool to see how people use different things to convey the same work!

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/30/50-fresh-portfolio-websites-for-your-inspiration/