lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

Lately I was going true some job offers for junior web designers and found out that some of the companies require some sort of art work except the technical knowledge like XHTML, CSS, scripting etc.

I started to thing what would I do. I have not done any art work up till now . I decided to draw something.

Impossible ?

One might say with zero experiences and no technique it is not really possible. That sounds to me as a quite a big challenge what I always like so I said to myself - why don’t you draw self-portrait. And that was it. Done. I made my mind.

Preparation

I bought sketch block, couple of pencils and rubber. I had no idea what will I need so I have chosen what I thought will be useful.

Start

I went home, opened my laptop and chose photograph from my album. I took 2b pencil I started to draw, eyes first then nose, lips and hair at the end. I have tried to do the shading with my finger. It was really funny and I enjoyed it a lot. It took me 8 hours to finish it.

The result is far far from perfect but I think it is not that bad for the first try.

Improvement on the way

I bought some books about drawing so I am going to improve my techniques. I am looking forward to it. Because of the fact that I am trying to prepare for My CIW web designer test it will take some time but I will get there.

There is a new section on my new blog called art work where I will display results of my hard work :o)

Any suggestions?

Do you draw? Send me a links to your work. All your suggestion and advices are welcome!

I picked this book because I have seen that other web designers are recommending it. To be honest I would not probably picked it in the book shop because the cover does not impress me a lot. It is obviously wrong to judge books on the base of their cover but that is the way my brain work naturally. But I try to fight it.

On the other hand, should not the book about design look attractive from outside? Even I know there is nothing the author can do about it because that is how it comes from publisher. Anyway I bought the book because I trust people who recommended it (funny think is that I have never met those people) and I have to say it was a very good decision. I have learned a lot from this book despite of the fact I have read couple of books about CSS before.

So what is this book about?

The book is about CSS as the cover says but not only about that. You can find here everything from text styling, images positioning & replacement, navigation, styling of tabular data, forms, different layout types and techniques up to browsers and devices support. You can find here information about the way professional developers produce their sites. The actual workflow and tools they use.

If you are new to CSS do not worry, you will find here all the necessary information about differences between IDs and Classes, how to style the links, how to define background images, how to define text that can be enlarged in any internet browser and so on and so on.

Structure of the book

As you can see from the names of the chapters the books content is divided into the chapters where each of them answers one particular question. There is more then 100 of them. I think it is very good idea to name your chapters with questions. These are the exact questions which I ask myself during the development process.

More importantly whenever you have a problem and looking for a solution you can just simply go true the Table of content and find the question you are asking yourself. In most of the cases you will find it in this book.

What do I find very interesting ?

The stuff I have not find in other books. Chapters with these names:

• I only have access to one operating system. How can I test in more of these browsers?
• Is there a service that can show me how my site looks in various browsers?
• Can I install multiple versions of Internet Explorer in Windows?
• How do I test my stile in a text-only browser
• How do I test my site in a screen reader?
• How do I create print style sheet?
• How do I create style sheet switcher?

Summary

The books is really well written and consist of very useful stuff. I will definitely use it on a daily bases so it can not go far from my table. Actually after I finished reading this book I found the cover somehow more interesting. So for the future I have to be really more careful with first judgments. :o) Have you read the book? What are your opinions?

The CSS Anthology site, Rachel Adrew’s personal blog

It was about a year ago when I started to play with HTML code. At that time when I opened the source code view in internet browser I saw only mess of some words which did not say anything to me. I had no idea what CSS is and how it works. I did not know anything about work in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Firework. I knew that some of these software exist but I had no idea what can I do with them.I had no idea about existence of web sites like Flickr, Delicious, Technorati. No Idea that something like blogs exist. Yeah blogs. I did not know that they exist and what they are for not even mentioning blog engines like Wordpress, Movable Type or Expression Engine.
So you can basically say I did not know a lot about web and web design.

What happened during that year?

I was studding. Whenever there was time. Day or night. To get as much knowledge as I could. I was reading the books which came with my CIW course. Actually 3-4 times each of them. Then I realized it is not enough so I have started to buy books which I have found on the best web designers blogs. I think they should get some commissions from Amazon. After reading of couple of books I have started to realize what is it all about. How to follow the web standards, how to validate my code etc.

After one year of studding I found out that more you learn the more you realize that you do not know that much. There is plenty to study. Things like typography, colour management, positioning of elements, editing of images in Photoshop, creating of art works in illustrator, banners in flash and not to forget about hand coding. I have to learn how to create my CSS more simple, how to use Java-script - DOM script which graduates gracefully and at the end I would like to learn PHP and other languages like French and improve my English. (As you can see from my article I really need it!). I just wish the day has 50 hours at least.

As it looks there is enough for the year which is behind the doors. I am still full of power to learn and hungry for knowledge and that will help me to go as smooth as I was going this year.

You can help

You can follow my progress live on this blog. If you know about any way to make it more easy for me then I am waiting for you advices.