Got a Minute for E.Webscapes?

Elite by Design has a blog post entitled, "Getting Inspiration Wrong: Website Rip Offs," in which the author offers paired comparisons of possible rip offs. I open our Got a Minute for E.Webscapes with the EbD link to get you thinking about the boundary between inspiration and rip-offspiration.

Assignment:

1. Take a few minutes to read through that post.
2. Head over to E.Webscapes.
3. I don't think that E.Webscapes is exactly "ripping off" some other design, but there's a very close family resemblance to design elements used by some big company whose logo is a piece of forbidden fruit. Steve Nojobs has compiled all 27 of this company's ads on his blog page, for those of us who need help figuring out the design "inspiration" for E.Webscapes. Is this out of bounds?

Think that "borrowing" a silhouette logo idea and repackaging it in a different format means it can't be a ripoff? Check out youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com and think again.

Need to create silhouettes for yourself? Check this out!

Tough Class Today (3/10)

Today didn't go well.

We had to bump the discussion of Williams and Tollett, and the planned workshop on web design ideas because too few people had done that homework. Then the brief tour of Dreamweaver got ugly and people experienced about 6 different things that can go wrong. Things were slow at times, too fast and confusing at other moments. No one left class with a clear sense that they accomplished "real" work on the personal website.

I spent a couple hours tonight reflecting on the class, and have come to the following decision:

I'm going to shift the WIKI part back to the last portion of the class and move more personal website work into the middle. This will enable us to make good progress on our sites.

Don't feel too frustrated if you're lost. You poked around in Dreamweaver, tried a few things (links, modify a template, make new pages based on a template, change some colors in the stylesheet, etc.) And you got a general look through some key parts of the interface.

I do have Dreamweaver screencasts to help with each part of the interface, and with making key modifications to the templates. These will be helpful in the coming weeks.

Let's come to class with our work ready to go next Tuesday, pick up the pieces, and carry on!

We'll talk about Williams & Tollett, Krug, our draft website content, and our designs. We'll also put our content into 4 pages on the website and actually upload a "draft" personal website. Bring your feedback for your peers so they have something to work with as they revise their own content.

Got a Minute for One Hat Designs?

One Hat is a studio that offers integrated media solutions. I posted the studio in Got a Minute because they include video projects in their portfolio. I like the limited use of Flash on the site. It adds some animation and dynamism to the home page without distracting the reader from the real content on the site.

Assignment:

1. Take a look at the effect on the buttons and the graphic effect at the bottom of the key images on each page. What do you think?
2. Look at the key images again. Why do you think they chose to put a red border across the top? What about the black border at the bottom?

Got a Minute for Bluewater?

Bluewater Web Development has a clean, minimalist website. Take a minute to poke around.

Assignment:

Choose a website you like from the portfolio. Write up a brief interpretation of what works and what doesn't in the site.

Got a Minute for Sacha Dean Biyan?

Sacha Dean Biyan, a photographer (or so it seems), has a very engaging website called Eccentris, if you have Flash installed on your machine. (The "no flash" version is just a one-pager. What's that tell you?)

You’ll probably want to spend more than a minute exploring the Eccentris site. Trust me. It’s worth the time. Eccentris even has a wallpaper pack for the iPhone. What the...?

Assignment: Find something specific about this site that you think it interesting, or perhaps even offensive.

Got a Minute for 4 Guys Interactive?

Check out 4guys.com This is an interesting little design house that illustrates how one might use icons for navigation.

Personally, I think the careers icon looks more like a sign for the men's room than a jobs link.

Assignment:

1. Find the essay, "Real world 'lessons learned' about designing effective Web sites," and read it. (Hint: It's in the Essays section, under Education. If you can't find it, perhaps the icons aren't working as nav.)
   
2. Pick one of the 4Guys "discoveries" and comment on it here.
3. Don't comment on a discovery already discussed by another student, until all 9 discoveries get treatment.
   

Discovery #7

Discovery #7: watch your competitors and leaders in other industries so you can stay ahead of their innovations.

Discovery#7 is about learning what you can do better in order to keep people visiting your website, also it's a way for you to see what your competitors are doing and use it to enhance or upgrade your own web page. This discovery has a link to cool homepages.com which provides inspirations that can be gained from top web designers. I checked out this site and I thought it was awesome and an inspiration to motivate my creativity with seeing thousands web designs.

Metaphors for the Cell

John Markoff of The New York Times, writing in today's paper, claims that our cell phones are built on a metaphor.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information.

Here's the article.

What is this new metaphor? Do you see it in your cell phone? Do tell

Blog Themes

You've been styling your blog with a theme you like. Hopefully, your theme is starting to "fit" with your blog topic. Hopefully, you're also adding new page elements to your blog and making some use of Blogger's "gadget" options. Now it's time to tell us what you're attempting here.

I'll go first. I took the minimal theme and went with black background and that bright orange color because I'm drawing on the logo for the primetime drama Criminal Minds. I styled the course website theme with that logo in mind, and named the style "Dr. Reid" as a clear gesture of acknowledgment. Consistency told me to run with it on the course blog.

The Label Cloud page element is something that implements a tag cloud-like aspect to the post labels feature in Blogger. Labels help us narrow down our reading when we want a specific set of posts. The blogroll makes it easy for us to find each other's blogs. The Pogue's Posts is a feed subcription to David Pogue's tech columns in the NY Times, fitting in a course like this. The Hangman game gadget fits for two reasons: it has writing and one must have some fun on a website. Haven't played hangman in a while, have you? Give it a go.

What's in your blog?

Got a Minute for Newark1?

Newark1 has a great website/portfolio. What makes it great is that it is a real web design resource for budding web developers. You can find help on choosing a color palette for your website, on layout and the ordering of visual and textual elements, and a whole bunch of generally very good tips. With all this help, you can do a lot worse than spend some time taking lessons from the folks at Newark1.

Assignment:

1. Pick one of the brief lessons or tips at Newark1
2. Choose a website from the Internet (there are a few available)
3. Use what you learned in the Newark1 lesson to interpret a piece of the website you chose.
4. Write up a 200-word overview of the lesson, the website, and your interpretation as a comment.
   

Got a Minute for Deena?

Deena’s portfolio is an example of a site that you can imagine surpassing before the end of the term. It looks like Deena is making some real money as a web designer, and this might prove quite encouraging to you!

Assignment:

1. Look over Deena's portfolio.
2. Find one constructive change you'd make.
3. Post a comment describing why you think the change would improve the site.
   

Stephenson, Command Lines, and Metaphors

Neal Stephenson writes:

"So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with - be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word-processing documents - into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with" (Stephenson 18).

Look at the OS (operating system) and the GUI (graphical user interface) you're using right now. Can you find some metaphors or abstractions? Do share!

First Class

Good discussion, questions, and ideas on day one. While I don't expect folks "understand" much of what we started talking about, I do hope your interest is piqued.

Please post additional thoughts on the Wesch video as a comment to this post.

Got a Minute for BTmplates?

BTemplates has 60 pages of Blogger templates. For those unsatisfied with the basics provided by Blogger, and willing to take a few minutes to figure out how to upload a different template, BTemplates may be just the ticket.

Organized by categories, BTemplates helps you find what you want. And once your template is in Blogger, you can add your own customizations. (Don't be shy; give it a try. Be sure to post a comment with a link if you decide to upload a template.)

Aren't we talking about interfaces and operating systems? Check out the Retro MacOS theme (page 60, on the day I went to the site).

Books for Class (Amazon)

The books on order for the class are available in the campus bookstore, and there are a couple used copies of some of them. In a course like this one, it seems only fitting to consider places on the internet where course texts can be purchased.

Here are the books for class, a rough date when you'll NEED them, and the best (new/used) price available through Amazon (as of Friday, January 23).

• In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson (Required) - Needed Immediately - $8.50/$1.40
  
• Head First HTML, by Elizabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman (Required) - Needed by Week 3 - $26.39/$17.19
• Blogs, Wikis, MySpace, and More, by Terry Burrows (Recommended) - Helpful Immediately - $10.17/$8.74
• CSS: The Missing Manual, by David Sawyer McFarland (Recommended) - Helpful Almost Immediately - $23.09/$19.97
  

These books ordered new from Amazon are less than $70. Go used and the cost drops to less than $50. By only the required books, go used, and you're down for less than $20 in bound texts.

Do buy the Stephenson at the bookstore, unless you're going to order on January 27, with 2 day shipping. It's the cheapest book on the list, it's a good read, and we're starting the course with it.

Find better prices elsewhere? Share with a comment!