lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

Last weekend I had short trip around the London. The original ideal was to visit the Tate gallery where I have not been before.

As soon as I got off the bus amazing architecture attracted my attention. I started waling with my head turned towards the ski until I almost hit the traffic sign.

London is full of exceptional architectural objects. You can choose almost any street in the City and just shoot and shoot and shoot pictures until you use your entire memory card. As long as the weather is nice there is no way that the photos will look bad.

At the end I have reached the gallery but tacking pictures is forbidden in there so I am not able to show you any art work. The weather was beautiful so I took a walk along the river and continued taking pictures of whatever kicked my eyes.

Camera

I use really unprofessional camera but even then after some tweaks in Photoshop I am quite satisfied with the images. You can see couple of them bellow and even more in my flickr. I plan to buy better camera and use the RAW format in the future. That way I will be able to get more from the photos.

Any ideas?

If you have any suggestions about the camera or photography in general please let me know. I am considering CANON. The most popular one when I have checked the flickr stats.

If I should summarize this book in single sentence I would say that this is the most beautifully presented book about web design I have ever seen.

The books deals very well with design issues as well as coding and accessibility. In terms of design you will find lots of inspiration presented in many different ways. The book is full of amazing photographs, pictures and artwork collections.

Inspiration

Andy explains where you can find the inspiration in the real world and this is the section where I found myself in the same box. The inspiration is everywhere and there is no point to concentrate on the web only. It is about walking with open eyes and looking around whenever you are. You can find the inspiration for your projects in architecture projects such are building, bridges or in the transport projects such are vehicles, signs or in furniture projects such are tables, sofas or in the print products such are posters, adverts, magazines, packages etc. In all of these examples you will find colours, patterns, shapes, icons, symbols, layouts.

Grid

Quite big part of the book is dedicated to explanation how grid is implemented in modern web design. To be honest when I was reading this part something clicked in my brain and I have just realized why I liked some sites even I was not able to specify exactly the reason. Now I know. It is a precise use of grid.

As excellent example is Jeff Croft’s site. You cannot see the vibrant colours or rounded corners but the site looks absolutely cool. Jeff uses 4 columns grid for his site and that is the point where is the magic. Everything sits just in its place and your eye can fly true the content very easily. Obviously it is not the only factor why his site looks cool but it plays significant role. It was always one of my favourites sites.

In the last part Andy explains the term transcendence and all the necessary techniques how to achieve it with a help of CSS. Positioning, dealing with multiple image backgrounds, designing with multi-column layouts and lot more.

Summary

The book is well written and easy to read and that is the best synergy how you can learn and relax at the same time. Most of the points are presented with a use of wonderful images. And as science says the human memory will more easy store the information if it is visually presented. I wish all the books about web design would be presented this way.

Thank you Andy. Great work!

Book details

• Author: Andy Clarke
• Author’s blog: www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk
• Book’s site: www.transcendingcss.com
• ISBN: 0321410971

Last couple of days I was working on my first voluntary project. The project specification is following: create a simple web site (one page) focused on presenting accommodation in the beautiful part of Slovakia called Liptov. The web should be build with modern technologies such as XHTML, CSS, DOM scripting. The site should attract potential customers with images of the cottage and country around.

Preparation

I have decided to go for a strong graphics in the head section and for the easy and smooth design for the main content area. Later I have decided to include flickr script to offer the customer possibility to upload actual pictures on the flickr site and present them this way on their site.

Production

I have started the first phase in Photoshop where I created design proposal. After the agreement of proposal I started development of the XHTML code. There is only a little text so there the majority of the work was spent CSS coding. I have divided the code into tree files as I have done for my blog. Layout, Colour and Typography.

After the CSS coding I started the testing phase in the following browsers.

• Firefox
• Opera
• Netscape
• Internet Explorer 7, 6, 5

The last option was not really necessary because there is only 4 percent of internet browsers who use this archaic browser.

In the next phase I built DOM script which is presented on the page as a switch for displaying additional content of the page. It basically shows the division with more photographs and images from flickr site for the users who are interested to see and know more about the cottage and area where the it is situated.

In the last phase I have tried to reduce the size of the images. The images I use on the page are quit big but I tried to reduce the file size as much as I could until the quality was acceptable.

Going online soon

The site will be presented in three languages. The last task is to find the web host services and register it in the main search engines.

For now you can browse the test version