curse my easily distracted brain

so... I've read up to chapter 12 in the Non-Designer's Web Book and up to chapter 3 in the Web Portfolio Guide. Is that what we were supposed to read? I hope so.

All that stuff about graphic files, color modes, gif animations, typefaces and such details in the Non-Designer's Web Book was all very technical, but I think (I think) I have it figured out. I won't really know until I try and implement it in the site design of my e-portfolio. Some of it I understand from my web design class, but not all of it. We're going about things in a very different way in that class than we are in this one. We have done imagemaps and we have talked about different color modes, but we are waiting until we've mastered Dreamweaver to move on to messing very much with graphics. This is somewhat disappointing, but at least in this class we got to play with Photoshop last week. I still feel very incompetent with it, and it doesn't help that I don't have it on my own computer to practice with, but hopefully in the coming weeks I'll be able to build up more experience there. I can at least pretend I know what I'm doing.

I'm going to go ahead and do the quiz to chapter 12 in my blog here to save a tree, and because the book is open to that page right here next to me at the moment and who knows when that will happen again before tomorrow.

Quiz 12

- You should never choose any old typeface on your hard disk and set default headlines with it. It is better to use common fonts that will display properly in any browser.
- You should never let the text run the entire width of the web page.
- You should never set lots of text in all-caps, only small chunks of text when you really must have the all-caps look.
- You should never put red text on an orange background no matter how dazzling or artsy you think it looks.
- You can sometimes make the type really large, but only when necessary and not all over the page.
- You should never specify that none of the links on your page be underlined. To do so would be misleading and/or confusing to your reader.
- You should only sometimes make your main text smaller than normal, but make sure it is an especially readable font.
- You should never use a busy background because it makes text hard to read.
- You should never use it italiccs on an entire web page. That would get annoying to read.
- You should never use really grungy typefaces to achieve a certain look. Legibility is more important.
- You should never make text all caps to compensate for a small font size. That's doubly hard to read.

There.

Hm... now, as for The Web Portfolio Guide, its advice on creating templates etc for my website was stuff I already knew. We learned templates in web design a few weeks ago and I have already implemented them in my design project for that class as well as in an experiment I am doing for the magazine Isotope. Go look at their website. It needs help, does it not? I'm redesigning it as best I can at the moment. I'm not perfect at this stuff yet but I'm working on it. And I'm having great fun in the process. I'm excited to add my e-portfolio design to this collection of designs I've got going on. A year ago I never ever thought that I'd be learning this kind of stuff. But it really isn't as hard as I thought. I think I might just be able to stop being so afraid of admitting its simplicity to myself...