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| Design48 is the showcase for my digital art.
- Marte Thompson | |||
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Design48 -
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Methodology Every designer has their own way of going about a project, and every project is different. But there are certain rules of thumb that I generally follow. Web pages used to be built entirely with HTML and a few images. Then came gif animations, and the pages got gaudier and gaudier. At Oracle in 1999, they decided to put the breaks on all the blinking lights and rainbow banners. (Everybody with a computer had morphed overnight into a web designer.) I was hired to write a style guide and simplify the "look and feel" of an intranet portal called, cleverly, "Dashboard." Having been a designer there two years earlier, I knew that Oracle already had a style guide, just as any other corporation does. I pointed this out to my new manager, and directed him to Oracle Marketing, which was under the keen supervision of my old boss, Mark Jarvis. There, we found everything we needed to get started. It certainly cut through alot of design issues, like corporate logos, fonts, colors, photos and product endorsement graphics, and even complete page templates. You can imagine how much time and effort, not to mention office politics and hurt feelings, this saved. And we all learned alot! |
After being a technical illustrator and graphic designer for many years, learning HTML was a hurdle I had to get beyond. Once I got it under my belt, thanks in large measure to the computer lab at West Valley College and lots of practice, I regained my confidence as a designer. And it quickly became apparent that everything I knew as a graphic designer was directly applicable to web design. HTML was simply another formatting device, and the browser a new form of paper. And of course, much more. Macromedia vs. Adobe By the millenium, our expectations of what a website was had grown. Incorporated into designing for the browser were graphic design, film and animation, and software applications. Web designers had to become web developers. Another learning curve. These days, I almost always create webpages with a combination of Flash and HTML. The HTML forms the skeleton or framework for the content, which can be text, images, or animations. A template for the entire site is built, and then each page is loaded with the content. Formatting attributes such as fonts and colors, as well as positioning of certain elements, are controlled by the cascading style sheet. And then there's Javascript... |
Javascript is much more of a challenge than HTML was, but fortunately, you don't need to know everything about it before you can start using it. You can digest it in small bites, no pun intended.
The other thing I want to point out about Javascript, aside from the fact that it doesn't help you at all with Java, is that it is alot like Flash ActionScript. All of the "mouse listening" tricks are almost identical in both. ActionScript is (in a way) Macromedia's version of Javascript, so Flash is (in a way) a Javascript generator. In fact, Dreamweaver, another great software tool from Macromedia, is kind of a DHTML generator. DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, is just about everything you need to design interactive web sites. When Macromedia merged with Allaire (Coldfusion and Homesite) their products raised the bar for every other web tool designer. It was the smartest move they ever made, and shook awake even the Almighty Adobe. Microsoft I'm ignoring Microsoft, for the time being. That's tomorrow's essay. But I am enjoying this writing thing! |
