Web Design
A series of articles on web design presented by web design from scratch. Each article covers a key point such as how people use web pages, how they scan a page, how impatient people are, keeping it simple, communicating rather than decorating, and conventions in web design.
Of particular interest is A Shaker Approach to Web Site Design
Designing for the Web by Joshua David McClurg-Genevese covers the key points of Resolution, Designing for browsers, Using Web-safe color, Graphics compression and Text (web safe fonts)
Web safe Fonts are
Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Times New Roman, Times, serif
Courier New, Courier, mono
Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Heidi Adkisson’s Web Design Practices
Modular Web Design by Dmitry Kirsanov. An Article on the concept of modular design applied to the web and key aspects of web design such as consistency, and page layout.
Web Page Design for Designers Joe Gillespie’s site is a comprehensive site covering graphics, typography, design, navigation issues,technical information and a full topic index.
Graphics for the web
Expert Optimization Five Tips for Optimizing JPEGs in Photoshop CS2 by Tanya Staples provided courtesy of Peachpit Press
Blogs and blogging
18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging by Darren Rowse
Blogs search engines and blog directories
Powered by WordPress Directory has been recently launched. This is a directory of blogs that are created using WordPress.org or WordPress.com
Blog finder is described as ” Technorati’s directory of blogs, organized by subject” Technorati auto classifies blogs based on the tags used by the author.
Google has a blog search engine which obviously is a search engine just for blogs. Results are returned not just from Googles Blogger sites but all blogs including blogs written in languages other than English.
blo.gs is a directory of recently updated weblogs and tools
Blogwise You can search by keyword or country
Globe of blogs you can search by key word or browse by topic, region etc
Open Directory Weblogs browse by topic
Bookmarking
A General Review of Social Bookmarking Tools authored by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott reviews web based software which has been designed to manage favourite links. These tools publish the bookmarks publicly and have an unstructured approach to user classification, otherwise known as tagging.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service.
Note in the teaching labs you can not install the browser buttons to bookmark a site. Students will have to log in to their account and use this post page in order to bookmark a site while using the computers at the university.
Furl is another social bookmarking tool
Note in the teaching labs you can not install the browser buttons to bookmark a site. Students will have use the furl save page . Students need to login and use this page to bookmark a site while using the computers at the university.
Another useful tools
BackPack is the handiest Web based organizers that I have come across. Instead of leaving a confusing trail of Word documents, stickies, text edit notes, and e-mails across my desktop I find that as I gather information I toss it all in backpack. I have even used it as a rough outliner. Backpack is free with paid plan options with more storage space.
A round up of Web Applications for Designers
RSS
Once you start poking around blogs you quickly have problems with ‘keeping up’ and reading does appear daunting. You don’t have to click from blog to blog to see if your favourites have new content. What you need is an aggregator to read the material that has been recently updated.
An RSS feed (Rich Site Summary) or (Really Simple Syndication) is a format which can deliver changing web content automatically. Many news-related sites, and blogs offer an RSS feed. Wikipedia defines RSS as
a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ’subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.
To view RSS feeds, you’ll need a specialized RSS-reading program called an aggregator or reader. A Feed Reader or News Aggregator is software which allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read. Their main advantage is that they save you time. When an aggregator is opened it is much like an email program which means that each blog can be scanned quickly. Posts that are not of interest can be skipped and deleted while those that are of interest can be focused on.
There are web based readers and readers that are stand alone applications housed on your own computer. Most RSS readers are free to use, and easy to learn. There are many web based readers available but I use Bloglines . Bloglines is free, easy to set up, and it is web based, meaning there is no software to download and install.
All you need to do is to go to the bloglines site and sign on. Once you have an account, you can subscribe to the blogs, news sites and tags you want to keep track of. You can sort and organize your subscriptions into folders and once you have a number of subscriptions bloglines will suggest other sites that may interest you.
Elsa Wenze of CNet has done a review on the popular RSS readers Make your own headlines looks at readers like Google reader and bloglines.
Take a look at this article on using Bloglines as it has clear comprehensive instructions, illustrated with screenshots which has been published by Preetam Rai of betterdays.
Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has published a what is article in What is RSS XML Atom Syndication? and Dave Winer has summarized the History of RSS published on the RSS at Harvard Law blog.
Describing RSS as “the food delivery guy of the Internet” Meryl Evans has written a clearly understood explanation of RSS and why people might want to use it. RSS what is it for? points out that syndication holds implications for both website visitors and website designers as one aspect of dynamic sites is being able to produce syndicated content that people want.
Ryan Singel writing for Wired News makes the observation in Aggregators Attack Info Overload that users are using aggregators in order to manage the information overload. Eric Dahl writing for PC World in RSS Hot Fix for Info-Junkies : Growing Web standard makes it easy to get news on the topics you want describes RSS as the “next Web-based time-saver”. Paul Boutin in How To Speed-Read the Net Ditch your browser RSS makes surfing for news a joy has described content in an RSS reader as a “an executive summary of what’s new on the Net today”
Aggregators allow users to shape their own media consumption. It is possible for a user to subscribe to some key news media outlets such as the BBC, or Reuters, as well as non-news sites such as Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The recent development of ‘tags’ means that people can also subscribe to material such as photographs in flickr. I have found that once I became used to shaping my own media mix using an aggregator it would be extremely difficult to be satisfied with simply the content provided by mainstream news sites.
The implications of RSS for how we create and consume media are many as RSS not enhances the range and diversity of available media products and allows consumers to easily shape their choice of material. The implications of a public able to self publish for cultural gatekeepers are huge. Many see the blogging phenomenon, as a grassroots movement which is a mix of journalism, public discourse, and social activity which can undermine mainstream media or ‘old media’. This is a huge topic which I will tackle another day but in the meantime here is a list of readers.
RSS Readers and Aggregators
Google reader
Yahoo has a list of readers
Google also has a list of readers
Other stuff
Some blogs and sites students might find interesting:
Stephanie Shimerdla of Obsidian Dawn has a collection of free Photoshop brushes, patterns and tutorials on her site. The site houses a gallery of paintings, sketches and selection of prints available. She also keeps a blog
March 12, 2007 at 8:48 am
I’m so pleased to see that you have added Mindtracks to your Table of Contents page. I’ve enjoyed picking your brains almost since you started blogging, period, and the information that you collect and disseminate, with the fashion in which you are able to share on different levels, together make a treasure trove that anyone would be nuts to miss. Please continue your usual wonderful work; I’m so glad the surgery has not impeded your life any more than necessary.
March 12, 2007 at 10:43 am
Many fine links here, thank you, Sharon.
(Parallel Lives required…)
You asked if this material is of interest – I think so! And probably for many.
Obsidian Dawn – so lovely. Was that a coincidental finding, or did my pointer at ts take you over there?
Thanks for all your work in making all your gatherings and finds available here.
March 12, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Thanks for the compliments and pleased you enjoyed the links -
I found Obsidian Dawn while poking around for Photoshop brushes – just a coincedence Jaihn – otherwise I would have linked to you with thanks
March 13, 2007 at 1:01 am
hi sharon , just found this other blog and loving all the info.
tks.