Mindtracks

Today in class I will be talking about both planning your site and introduce page layout.

Charley Parker has published a series on How to Display Your Art on the Web in 6 parts. It is aimed at illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present online in a professional manner. The coverage is thorough, well written, and easily understood. Start off with How not to display your art work on the web and pay attention to Planning your web site.

Who are you designing for?
It is crucial to ask who you are creating a website for. In How To Create Pen Portraits and Understand Your Target Audience Chris Garrett discusses pen portraits as a way to visualise who your website is for.

How do we know how people see a site? You will read many designer say this or that works. Their statements are usually based on research. For instance one way we know how users make sense of what they see on screen is through eye tracking. What is eye tracking? This video explains it.

Studies at the Poynter Institute, Stanford University use eye tracking equipment to track and record the way online readers’ eyes scan news websites. They analyse the way people pause on areas of the screen in order to absorb information.

Steve Outing and Laura Ruel report the most common eye-movement patterns discovered What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes . Their diagrams reveal on screen zones that are more important than others. See Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design

What not to do when designing a site is highlighted in Amateur Web Sites - the Top Ten Signs.  Charlie Morris points to busy backgrounds, badly designed navigation, using frames, a table based look, hit counters, “under construction signs”, endorsements to use a particular browser, cluttered pages containing free adds are all tell tale signs

Think about How people really use web pages which comes from a series of articles 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.

Heidi Adkisson’s Web Design Practices has good information and research mainly about navigation best practice.

Smashing Magazine has produced a list of 10 Principles of Effective Web Design

Whitespace by Mark Boulton

Jason Beaird has written The Principles of Beautiful Web Design for Sitepoint. The article is an excerpt from the book of the same name.

Kyle Meyer has published The Elements of Design Applied to the Web which is an excellent summery of the basics of design. Kyle Meyer applies the elements of balance, proportion, rhythm, emphasis, and unity to web page layout and illustrates these key elements with screen shots of good examples where these principals are applied expertly.

Patrick McNeil regularly reviews well designed websites on Design Meltdown. In his Designer Portfolios part 6 Patrick reviews and illustrates with thumbnail screenshots 10 portfolio sites that keep it simple and to the point.

Lorelle VanFossen has written a about the experience of designing a website for artists, musicians, painters, poets, or crafters in The Art of the Artist Web Design Collaboration as she teases out what issues are important to make a site work.

Readable text is accessible text. A Guide to Web Typography: The Basics is an excellent article from John Boardley of I love Typography. Key design points such as contrast, size, hierarchy, and space are covered concisely but well.

Keeping up with and understanding new features in software releases is always a bit of a challenge. For those who are using Flash and Illustrator hand in hand Understanding 9-Slice Scaling explains the new feature that has been added to Illustrator CS3 which allows you to control a Movie Clip symbol to scale in a particular way.

Drawing in Illustrator is the first part of a series on drawing (including using the pen tool) by Jeremy of Sack Lunch

Pretty Circles is a Illustrator tutorial which is aimed at those new to the program. This tutorial on Nora’s blog is ideal if you are new to Illustrator and want to understand transparency better.

Bittbox has written a new tutorial Illustrator 101: Faster Font Selection

In Inspiration: Assemblage, Montage, and Collage Sean Hodge of PSDTuts, has “assembled some resources together that will encourage you to combine and unify elements. Review traditional concepts, look at current work, and get inspired by digital masters. Learn powerful collage techniques and how to apply them in your designs.”

Sitepoint CSS Reference is a new reference collection of articles. What is CSS? Is particularly well done and since it answers the question so well I will be pointing my students to it. They have recently released their Sitepoint HTML reference too

I am off for a the easter weekend break and a few days after that too. I wil be back here mid next week.

Over on Mashable there is a comprehensible list of 120 various blogging tools, resources and links to articles that offer advice, tips and tricks. These resources are worth exploring for anyone new to blogging or even old hands will find the list useful

Sonia Zjawinski of Wired has produced this gallery of the various iterations that Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed Google’s logo, went through before settling on the final logo. How Google Got Its Colorful Logo steps through each iteration and Kendar explains the design shifts and reasoning behind them.

In class this week students will set up WordPress blogs

For a free service WordPress has excellent support, heaps of features, lots of themes to choose from, you can import an old blog easily if that blog platform allows exports, you can export your blog so you can shift it if need be and you can create extra stand alone pages.

If You Have a WordPress Problem

You can have a free WordPress blog on WordPress.com free help is available on the WordPress.com Forums and the WordPress.com FAQ.

If you keep a WordPress blog Lorelle on WordPress is a regular read not to be missed.

This morning in class I will be talking in class about establishing a blog, with the usual features such as categories, archives tags etc. I will be talking about theme choice and some of the widgets available with WordPress. We will also be working with images and preparing images for the web.

I will also speak about the actual process of blogging and offer some links to bloggers with sometimes a slightly different take on on it.

Set a goal

Decide what what you want to achieve with your blog and decide who do you want to reach and why? What are these people likely to be interested in that you can talk about?

Writing

Asking what to write about is a bit like asking what to draw. Many bloggers who need to look for content, but this is where those in the visual arts or designer makers have an advantage since visual artists already produce cultural artifacts of some kind. They make things. Write about the process of creating things, the design process, the techniques used and choices made in the production of studio work. Sources of inspiration, both visual and written can also be shaped to form a blog post.

This type of writing has another advantage as it will help you clarify your thoughts about your work and will improve how you write about your work.

Students have the advantage that they are in the process of being trained in their field, whereas there are many people who are interested in the visual arts are not trained. Share what you learn in the form tips and tricks. Look at what is happening in your field and write about that. What other artists are doing, what exhibitions you have been to and what you think about it.

Provide links to resources for people who are interested in your subject area or any area in the arts that is of interest to you. Linking to websites of interest not only keeps a record of sites visited for you but it also provides resources for your readers.

Many professional bloggers would advise that you write every day but they are using a blog to generate a living such as Problogger. Chris Garrett asked Do You Have to Write Every Day? and suggested that its a good idea to post only when you have something good to say.

The goals of a visual artist or designer maker and a professional blogger’s goals are different. For a studio based artist writing regularly is more important than writing daily. Decide to write something say twice or three times a week and stick to it. Make it a regular day for instance every Tuesday and Friday so that readers understand and get used to the pattern. Remember that primarily your income comes from work in a studio not as a writer.

Use the draft function and pre-write posts as you think of them. This has a number of advantages. You can write as an idea hits you and develop it into something better. Visual Arts students do very little writing in the course of their degree because students spend most of their time in studios actually creating objects of one sort or another. Using the draft function allows you can think about what you are writing, mull over what you really want to say and develop it a bit before publishing. Pay attention to grammar and spelling. I can’t stress enough how important this is. If you do not do this it makes you look bad. Full stop.

Blogs on blogging and resources

• Start Blogging
• Blogging Basics101
• Lorelle on WordPress
• Chris Garrett on New Media
• Daily Blog Tips
• Blogging Tips
• Build a better blog

Blogs that both dish out tips and advice on blogging numerous and I am doing a bit of a round up for my next class.

Lorrelle on WordPress is a regular must read for me as not a week goes by without something being published on her blog that is either useful or thoughtful. Lorrelle’s ongoing series on blogging resources keeps me coming back and this week she has been examining checking the facts in the process of researching an article

Daily Blog Tips is what it says delivering tips daily on running and writing a blog. In the recent piece Hold Tight, It Will Only Get Easier it points out  that blogging becomes easier over time and offers advice on dealing with feeling discouraged

Blogging Basics 101 is written for those who are new to blogging and Chilihead and Shannon actively encourage questions. With a tagline “where there are no stupid questions” they are approachable and since they answer questions clearly readers can pick up all sorts of tips by browsing their blog.

The semester has only just started and I am scratching to find time to devote to this blog. There a a few links to pieces I have been reading all of them on blogging so I have grouped them together.

Lorelle VanFossen  over on Blog Herald has written an excellent piece on issues some bloggers are ignorant of which run counter to what they are trying to achieve with a blog. In fact What You Don’t Know About Blogging Can Hurt You summarizes so many issues I will be pointing my Monday morning  students to it

Also on the Blog Herald J. Angelo Racoma warns bloggers of Scammers

Leelefever of Commoncraft has written a piece about Spam comments and the fine line between commenting in a genuine and authentic manner in order to join the conversation or commenting in order to leave a link. In other words commenting in order to promote your own site. Check it out as it is worth reading

Ever wondered what trackbacks are and why they are useful to bloggers? Terry Detty of Web reference has written a useful article Why Trackbacks are Useful For Blogs that answers the question and is to the point.