52 Posts: Week 2

Progress this week on the web design front… I’ve made a functional if simple internal webpage for my browser homepage.

 That is my progress so far… obviously in static form.  Not that there is anything especially interactive about it so far, only standard website links (with simple status actions to indicate visually when I hover, select and have visited sites).  The list of sites is just my preferred version of book marks (I hate all that scrolling thru ‘favorite’ bookmarks).

It was good to finally get away from my cook book approach; to pose my own design ‘problem’, and then solve my way thru it using a combination of image making skills with basic web design skills. There are so many tools to help with this stuff.  In some ways I can get lost in the tools and information.  So far I’ve found a reasonable combination of tools, from specific books (such as the classroom in a book series), lynda.com tutorials, to titles on design in general.  A recent find I am especially enjoying is: “Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design” by BrianMiller.

 

Another interesting analytical design resource is this new one, recently out in beta the HTTP Archive it has tons of info on how the top 1700 websites (interesting number in itself… why not 1500 or 2000?) .  Based on the FAQ page they select the 1700 from the union of 6 website rating services.  It looks to me to be a well thought out tool for analyzing something as complex as webpage performance in relation to the type of design elements used.  Anyway in the end there are pages and pages of information about how each site is coded even giving suggestions for better design efficiency. I compared the Adobe and Second Life sites … interesting comparisons.  SL had fewer ‘issues’ than Adobe’s; although, that may be due to the higher amount of media posting on the Adobe site.  To a newbie designer such as myself I find the level of information to be a bit overwhelming in both its complexity and volume.  Still I found it interesting, with the potential to be useful as I learn more.  So if there are any web-heads out there… go crazy with it.

 

As for Virtual World explorations, not much new to report on that front this week; although, I did enjoy the retrospective of Oberon Onmura’s work.  He has put up 5 works (some old & some new) over at Push.  It is interesting to see the origins of some of his more familiar pieces.   I am always impressed with the elegant minimalism of his designs and how creative he is with his use of scripting.