I know…I know…

I’m sure you all realize how terrible I am at this whole blogging thing. I have repeatedly neglected these poor pages, even though I am required to post every week. I have been learning a great deal more than I have been sharing with you and I am really enjoying this class. I’ve spent a great deal of time learning more on Photoshop, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver, and I’ve finished the sitepoint book, which has a great deal of insight as well. All of this is coming together for my final project, which is going to be my personal portfolio site, alter.native, as my wife’s pregnancy is keeping her from being able to currently work with me on her site. Here are two comps I have put together for the alter.native site.

Both the contact and main content div’s will be collapsible, though I will not be keeping the white rounded rectangle. The hoody image on the right will be an image map, although I havn’t figured out how I plan to incorporate the text links for SEO purposes. I’ll probably have a footer with those same links at the least.

Week Seven Hoohaha

This week we worked on gif animations in Fireworks and Photoshop. I actually never knew Photoshop could do animations in all these years I’ve been using so even though I’m not very fond of animated gif’s I was still excited to learn the process. I also read a great article in my readings about tactics for web design that was both informative and entertaining. In my other design class I was brought to a brilliant blog by a designer named Chris Spoon that has an amazing wealth of information on it for use of all the Adobe Suite and CSS tutorials.

Weeks of note, I promise.

These past few weeks I’ve been so busy I’m neglecting this poor blog. I have been learning an awful lot though. This past week I got a great deal of practice hand writing css code, which is very helpful for understanding css elements even when not handwriting them. I’m getting deeper and deeper into Fireworks, which is helping my painful advancement in learning to use and not hate Illustrator in my other design class. We have also recently started getting into learning about Photoshop, which is nice since it is the one CS4 program I have extensive knowledge in and I’m still learning an awful lot.

Deacon’s Word of the Week: Obfuscate

and what?

Final Project Proposals

I have two ideas and will be making both websites regardless of which one I choose to do for the project.

The first will be a website for the pet services business my wife is starting, called “Cross Your Paws”. To start off she will be doing mostly pet sitting and dog walking but she wants to do adoptive, behavioral, and animal-social consultations. I would get most of the imagery by taking pictures of our pets and possibly some of the Baltimore SPCA and Crofton Veterinary Center, as we have ties with both organizations. The written and conceptual content I would develop with my wife during creative brainstorming sessions. I am particularly interested in this project because it involves my wife and I working together as a team. The kuler color scheme I have developed for it is called Cross Your Paws

The second idea would be a design portfolio of sorts called alter.native. I have a website, alter.grounds, which is currently being developed in flex to go along with the recording label I’m starting up, and I have a separate page set up for its design, as well as a few other sites I’ve built. As I do more design work it would be nice to be able to incorporate everything into the design arm of alter.grounds, which I call alter.native. The site would be set up to show my photography, cover designs, web designs, and personal expressions (probably either a blog or poetry collections). It would especially be nice since alter.grounds is so chopped up at the moment while we’re working on its development and the current version of alter.native is boring and without content. The kuler color scheme I have developed for it is called Favorite Hoody.

Week Four Roundup.

So it has been one busy week and I’ve been learning an awful lot, mostly involving vector graphics and Fireworks.

On the side I drew up a little logo for the pet services business my wife is starting up. Since I have failed miserably in all previous Illustrator tasks in my other classes I thought it would be a good idea for practice to do something personal and get a little friendlier with the beast.

I also created a Kuler account and made the theme that’s used in the puppy logo. It’s good fun, Kuler. I see myself using it very often in my future design efforts.

Oh, I also did some work on my virtual resume, so if anyone wants to start paying me obscene amounts of money please, please feel free to call.

Deacon’s Word of the Week: Fricative

Complete with sudden death beatbox battle!

Deacon’s Word of the Week…

Prepare yourself for blacunabaviveration!

Week Three. Dreams woven with a vengeance.

The two most important things I learned this week is a) I absolutely love Adobe Fireworks and b) my computer hates the assets panel in Dreamweaver. I really enjoyed working with

Fireworks, the one program in the Adobe Suite I have yet to use until now, is great for doing mock ups and designs that involve mixing typeface and different image elements. I feel like I’ve just made a new friend. Along with all of the ins and outs of Dreamweaver I’m finally discovering through the Lynda.com videos, I’m starting to really gain confidence as a designer, or at least I will when I have time to do some designing in between all of the homework.

I don’t know if I can expect it in the future or if I was just getting bugged out but I had a bad experience with the assets panel in Dreamweaver. The program locked up every time I clicked on the panel and after six or seven forced quits and two restarts I just used the files panel and found my assets the hard way.

In addition to the assigned Lynda videos I found some of the video lectures (sponsored by Lynda.com) to be especially informative, particularly this one, since I really need to learn a lot more about working with css.

Week 2. The saga continues…

So I’m coming around the bend of my second week and the twitching muscles in my fingers corresponding to the worn spot on my track pad are physical evidence of the maddening redundancy. I have yet to create the index that will link to my barely edited exercise files from the Lynda work (all very informative) but I just finished constructing a blogroll of all of my classmates and I swore for a second there my brain was going to pop out of my skull and start screaming at me.

Although I am not convinced I will be enjoying linking all of the files I tweaked while following along the Lynda exercises I can say I enjoyed the exercises a lot for giving me some insight into some of the basic features of Dreamweaver I had yet to stumble upon while fiddling about in the dark. Being a copy and paste text pad editor, even as a Dreamweaver user, it’s nice to actually learn how to use the program for real.

The one feature that got me the most was the point to button. Simply by lining up the files or elements I need to link to on the screen I can easily drag to them from that button and create links on the fly. Love it.