My sister, Sara, and her creative director, Heather, have pretty much the best daily design challenge site I’ve seen. It also has the most awesome name. Design Fart.
Check it out at http://designfart.blogspot.com/.
You can also check out this great article from Smashing Magazine about daily designing.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/22/design-something-every-day/
It’s been a busy week and unfortunately we’ve been slacking on our creativity drills.
Josh drew Caffeine and took this beautiful picture of Andrew's coffee.
We had a guest participant last week! Deena Forsythe pulled "The Hangover" and sketched this masterpiece.
Amy chose "Projectile Chicken" and used photoshop to create an animated gif.
Today Ken chose Elderly Veggies.
Brian chose "Goldie Hawn" and since Hawn is swedish for Yawn he created this.
Amanda chose "Refreshing" today. Here is her sketch of a Beaver in a sprinkler.
Ken Murphy chose "Robot." He created a Mark I Design Bot complete with description!
Josh drew "Tantalizing Turnip" and used photoshop to create this image.
Amy drew "Cow at a table." 15 mins was not enough time to do this theme justice.
The Marcom department is now going to use this blog to post our Creative Drills. The rules are simple. Draw a theme from the magic malt ball box and create something that represents that theme in 15 minutes or less. Creativity can be expressed through photo manipulations, writing, chalk drawings, illustrations, etc. Our goal is to take a short break from all the Pierceness each day create something completely unique and off the wall.
Here’s our first attempts:
Brian Benedetti
Theme: The King of Creatures
Photoshop
Amanda Haines
Theme: Pregnancy
Pre-G Nancy
Mild-mannered office assistant with a nagging case of hammertoes.
Post-G Nancy
Compton and Long Beach together, now you know you in trouble.
Amy Foster
Theme: Butt Monkey
Illustrator
The Marcom graphics team is in the middle of a great adjustment. We’ve lost Teri, our awesome publication manager and have absorbed her position. The added unknowns and stress has started to wear on my creativity. I find my “creativity tank” to be running on empty while I’m tasked with one of the most exciting projects I’ve had since I’ve been here. The slick 12 page 21st Century Learning Campaign Brochure for the Foundation.
I talked to my sister Sara, senior graphic designer for South Sound Magazine, this last weekend about what she does when creativity escapes her. What she told me gave me a whole new outlook on my day to day life. She told me to mix it up. Don’t get stuck in a routine. Don’t go the same way to and from work everyday. Don’t let every week look the same as the last. Keep your brain working. I realized how stuck in a rut I was. I have 3 or 4 day templates that I play out every week depending on what I need to get done. I’m going to do my best to throw those out the window and try something different even if it’s as simple as trying a new way home from work.
That’s my plan. What you do to keep your mind fresh and creativity flowing?
Through the web redesign process Andrew, our fearless webmaster, shared with us the recent trend in fantastically designed footers on webpages. It never really occurred to me to put more than the copywrite info and possibly some links below the main content of a website. Now I’m all about the footers. They can be used to keep the visitor on the site longer, aid in Search Engine Optimization and just plain add to the overall design of the site. Check out the link below to view a showcase of some fantastic footers.
“I would have liked to have seen more animal crackers and prunes in my dessert.” I overheard that phrase being uttered on Food Network last night, and thought it was a good one to share with all of you.
As promised, I failed miserably at blogging three times a week like I have my Outlook calendar reminders set up for, that “Snooze” button is far to easy to hit. I’ve noticed some of my colleagues have had time to blog, so I suppose I should too, so, here’s another blog that I can chalk up and say I’ve written.
First, Web Design World Seattle 2009 is a quick few days away! Don’t look for me there, as the price tag doesn’t agree with the tight budget we’re all on these days, BUT, if you’re lucky enough to attend, it should be a great one this year. Some fantastic speakers lined up including Cameron Moll, Stephanie Sullivan, and Dan Rubin.
Here’s a statement that I’ve lived by for a number of years, much to the chagrin of some of my friends that I’ve worked on web projects with. I loath code libraries, templating engines, frameworks, and the like. My argument has been the sheer overhead these bring to projects, all the unnecessary code added, and in my opinion the maintainability of the project as a whole. Also the fact that I don’t like not knowing what the code is doing and how it’s working, one thing you have absolute knowledge of when you hand code everything yourself. However, over the years, my arguments are becoming weaker and weaker by more advanced techniques coming out to accomplish tasks. This couldn’t be any more obvious than in Javascript libraries, which is why, around a year ago, I decided I’d finally give a Javascript library a chance.
There are tons of libraries to choose from, some of the majors being jQuery, Moo Tools, Prototype, DOJO, and Yahoo’s YUI. After weighing the pros, cons, looking at implementation, code examples, I settled on jQuery as the library I would at least try. At this point, I couldn’t be happier using jQuery, and don’t think I’d start another project without it. The simplicity of the code required to do even some of the most complex DOM manipulation is amazing, and chances are, if you don’t know how to accomplish a task, it’s likely that someone has already tried it and put out a tutorial on how to do it. The transition from beginning jQuery to being adapt in it is very quick, as there are a number of great tutorial sites out there. There is also an extensive plugin database as well a great number of extended libraries that utilize jQuery. All in all, my pilgrimage into the depths of (at least this) Javascript library was a pleasant one, though the same thing cannot be said about frameworks, but that’s another blog post all together.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll post and review some of the jQuery code we’ll be using on the new Pierce College website.
Resources
I often get asked what books I recommend for learning or mastering (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, AJAX, etc, and I’m always at a loss of what to tell people. See, I’ve never specifically went out and bought a book for any of that. Everything I’ve learned over the years has been through experimentation, viewing examples, tearing down other people’s pages to see how they got things to work, and lots of reading, on the web.
I’m not sure it’s necessary to ever buy a book to learn web design and development, but I suppose it depends on how you learn. I think there are more than enough online resources to get anyone interested started in any web language. And there are even more tutorials and walkthroughs for the more advanced.
But, because I’ve been asked the question so much, I’ve decided to compile a list of sources I would recommend, both in print and online.
Markup
CSS
General and Usability
Tutorial Links
Inspiration
Industry Leaders
Here is a web development timeline starting from 1990 through 2009 and how all the client and server side versions have evolved.
URL: http://tinyurl.com/cetjjp
Source: Wikimedia.org