After reviewing the WebDesignerWall article, I'm now overwhelmed with column and organizational ideas. So many ways to create organized chaos!

Designing with Grids



I'm beginning to think that typography is pretty important on the web! :) The CSS Typography article certainly think so and highly recommends using CSS before anything else. I'd say this is probably a good idea given that Dreamweaver works so well with it.



This font survey result is a pretty handy tool.



My thoughts on Prototyping: I like the idea of getting my hands dirty, and making the paper prototypes with windows for "scrolling" text and pop up "drop down" menus. I'm thinking that Fireworks is a much more efficient way of mocking up ideas to turn comps into interactive demos for a client.



Adobe Press put out an informative article. I found the tips here to be useful and are keeping them well in mind as I design my site.

Typography....

I feel so much more the connesieur of characters now.... or not! :) I have always enjoyed playing with fonts but I am now a bit more concious of maintaining some restraint in choice (as far as choising readable/available fonts, and keeping the vairiance to a minimum). I'm also happy to report that I now finally know what exactly serif and sans serif fonts are!

Here's my attempt at the design comp from class. Working through this and just getting one done gives me more confidence with my own designs.

Design Comp

Article from Matt Brown of Adobe:

I think these points gathered here will come quite in handy while we build our final pages. Although, all of these tips have individual details the overall sentiment is usability, usability and usability.

I just finished my animation. It's here. Overall I like the way it turned out. I'm sure there are some things that could be tweaked a bit but I'm happy with the result.

Here is my animation.

I revised both of my designs, I still like the raining one better but after a few tweaks the one with the flowers isn't too shabby. Here they are, with the mini's:

Rain

Rain-mini

Flowers

Flowers-mini

I just read the articles assigned for this week. Here are my reactions:

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

I have to say that I'm astonished of the thought that users don't scroll. I remember the first few websites I visited as an elementary school student, they wasn't much to them and no opportunity for a scroll but other than pages that don't have the content, I love a good scroll. As an historically dial-up user (it has only been two years since my parents house was able to get anything faster) I hate having to click on a link to get more information or to wait for a site that is so jam packed with information that it takes forever to load.

However, the best comment Milissa made was, "The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it." So if your page is boring or too complicated no one is going to want to decipher it. But if you have a good clean presentation with interesting and relevant content who cares about a scroll.

Search Engine Placement Tips

This article brought up some points that I haven't even thought of yet. I am still trying to figure out the design portion of my site. :) I can tell that it's not going to be easy to find appropriate keywords that will boost my rating but it'll be fun to play around.

Five Principles to Design By

Josh brought up an interesting perspective on design. By making a web page we are not only satisfying our clients, but their potential clients as well. He essentially said that users are customers. This is something that has been implied but seeing it so implicitly put is a light bulb for me. :) Duh! I'm going to have two masters to serve so to speak.

I don't necessarily agree with him about the relationship of art and design. I think that good art elicits an emotion or experience from a viewer. Art is all about what the artist is trying to portray and won't be successful with out good design. I think the two go hand in hand. You can't have a good design with out evoking some sort of emotion. Good design takes art and uses it, it's a form of art. Maybe it's because I'm a believer in the "art is life" philosophy. I will concede that you shouldn't overpower your designs because of some self-ish/altruistic vision that completely undermines the purpose. But art should be integrated throughout your design and when done successfully can enhance your final piece.

8 Web Design Tactics

I loved this article. I have used a few of these tips myself (walk away, sketch, absorbency..)
I do find the hardest one to put into play is learning to let it go. I'm stubborn, and when I want something to work it's hard for me to give up. It is detrimental and I've ruined a few pieces because I couldn't walk away and just let it go.