the singularity of being and nothingness
Posts tagged Web Design
On Becoming a Better Web Designer
Feb 8th
Anytime one approaches a new design project, it is easy to get distracted by trying to have the project finished NOW, instead of doing necessary preparation work to ensure maximum work efficiency. I am as guilty of this as anyone. In the past, designing a website and bringing it through development was a hodge-podge of cutting Photoshop files and piecing together random bits of code, all the while constantly being frustrated that things were not finished YET.
As I've matured, I've learned to identify several time black-holes that serve to quickly derail a project's timeline.
Unorginization
Without question, this is the one for me. It is especially a problem because from design concept (Illustrator) to web-ready images (Photoshop) to HTML (Dreamweaver) to database (MySQL) to application code (ColdFusion), my files are touching a lot of applications. If I'm not careful, it's easy to, say, save Photoshop files to random places and then have to search for them when I need them in Dreamweaver. While this is only a matter of seconds (normally!), it adds up over the course of a project and is frankly annoying.
So the biggest time and headache-saver I've learned is to standardize every aspect of the project. This means I More >
Long Time No Post–And a New Design!
Dec 10th
Wow–it's been almost a month since my last post…not good. Anyway, I've been terribly busy with my new job.
The new job has been somewhat of an adjustment because my job responsibilities have moved beyond simple design and coding: now, I am intimately involved in project planning, of which my greatest responsibility is helping to select and implement a brand-spanking new Content Management System that will service our entire organization.
But it's not been all meetings and research. From time to time, I still get to design and code. In addition to the CMS, we are also launching into a system-wide Intranet. As part of the communications plan, we decided to create a project site where we could blog about the progress of implementation as well as post training videos and other important information. I was fortunate enough to be handed the design of the site, which can be seen above.
For this design, I decided to use some bold colors and design features. I had already designed the logo, so I really wanted to play off the green in it. For a while, I struggled with the overall design, for it just didn't seem like the green and charcoal were doing More >
landscape-expressions.com Receives Design Kudos
Aug 22nd
Okay, more gratuitous self-aggrandizement.
The site which I recently finished, landscape-expressions.com , has been featured on the following design sites:
Hooray.
/end self-congratulatory post
Share this: existdissolve.com Receives Design Recognition
Jul 26th
As if having a blog devoted to nothing more than my own personal aggrandizement isn't enough, please allow for but a bit more gratuitous self-promotion. As many of my readers know, my "day job" is web-design. From initial concept creation, to html programming, to database architecture and application development, this is what I do. While I am certainly not the best, I do strive to make things work well and look good.
This site is a product of my most recent efforts. In designing and developing it, I operated with simplicity in mind. While there were a lot of other bells and whistles that I would have liked to add, their inclusion seemed to unnecessarily bulk up the site. Also, I attempted to make the site as bright and inviting as possible. While I liked the color scheme of the old template, it did get quite dreary after a while, and I for one welcome the change.
Well, finally my hard work has paid off in part. Over this last week, I was privileged to be featured on no less than 3 web design showcases. While they all have varying criteria for their entries, the majority of these sites base inclusion More >
A Revelation of Online Proportions
Jul 9th
Those not involved in website design and development may not know where I am coming from (and therefore not care), but I found something incredibly interesting today. During my lunch break, I was making some updates to my blog, specifically adding links and images of the various browsers that are friendly to the design of my site (pretty much everything worked except the devil [IE 6], thank you very much). Of course, I went first of all to the ol' standard browsers–Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Opera. No problems. Then, I decided to see how Safari and Camino–both Mac browsers–handled it. No problems either. Woot.
Feeling pretty good about myself, I went off in search of some good-looking logos that I could use to provide links to said browsers that no one will actually ever use. After finding all of the ones I wanted, I finished by searching for a great image of Safari's logo on Apple's site (not hard, since it is Mac and, therefore, necessarily wonderful). To my surprise, I learned that Safari 3 is now in beta…for Windows! Finally, a great Mac browser is coming to the devil's computer…it's about time.
Intrigued by my new discovery, I decided to see More >
