Week 5: Fireworks, Flanders, and other Flapdoodle

I might want to use Illustrator instead of Fireworks for part of my project. Although it is very similar, I am more familiar with the former, and want to play with my ideas rather than spend time learning a new (to me) program. However, I did the sample exercise and drawing tools in class and finished it today, Friday. Now I am playing with banner ideas. I love the sculpture at the entrance by Big Vanilla, and would like to use that in my design, somehow. I also long for the dogwoods and redbuds to bloom. Maybe I can use those as the source for my second design, and hurry them along!

Flanders is a stitch! I laughed until I cried at some of his and others’ comments. The websites were atrocious, and I had to put in eyedrops after that Yvette formal shop site. Gack! I will remember the flashing, repetitious, garish, confusing, seizure-inducing bottom ten when I start to “busy up” my designs. I loved this website.

Week 4 – CAT 274

As usual with Adobe software, the possibilities are limitless, as are the methods for accomplishing tasks. Having three or more different ways to achieve the same result is helpful for different learning styles, but puts me into overwhelm sometimes. In the classwork for week 4, working with images in Fireworks, I found some repetition of procedures from Photoshop. I have not worked with Fireworks before, so was comforted by this familiarity, but wonder how useful the application really is, if I have Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver available to me.

I was happy to see the improvement in the Photoshop CS4 program over CS3; it is worthwhile to upgrade, after all! For example, just the increased sensitivity of the burn and dodge tools is happy news. Having the synchronization between Adobe applications is so convenient: smart objects, workspace, and other smooth transitions make the work so much like play.

The discussion of color was interesting, too. Most of the color theory in the first part of the chapter took me back to the class I took so long ago, at the Maryland Institute, discussing theory, color scheme and emotional impact. The new information about Internet, Hexidecimal, and digital color took more attention on my part. I was interested to note in the readings that the magenta color of visited links was considered to be duller (less saturated) than the blue of unvisited links. Maybe my experience is too limited, or my eyes perceive color differently. . .

Jakob Nielsen gave several views that I agree with: slow loading is one major pet peeve. I hate to point this out in a class blog, but AACC’s faculty page is a pain! Every time I check my roster, record grades, etc., I have to scroll down to the current semester (I’ve been here too long. . .) and wait for the classes to load, choose one at a time, yawn, Z-Z-Z-Z.

Week 3 – CAT 274

Once again, I whipped through the chapter on text styling with no problem, until I reached the next-to-last task: the Spry tooltip widget. Not satisfied with just placing the tooltip, I had to change the color of the text from black to white, so that it would show up better. As soon as I completed the tweak, I received the message, “Elements “#sprytrigger1″ do not exist on the page. ” I tried redoing the change in a few different ways, but still got the same message. I’m sure I’m overlooking something simple, but I don’t know what that is. . .More will be revealed in class, I’m sure. Here is a link to Week 3

Now that the link is posted, I see that the borders are also not showing up. Back to Dreamweaver!

In Jason Beaird’s book, Beautiful Web Design, I was comforted by the familiar discussion of the Rule of Thirds, which was my favorite unwritten design rule when I first taught darkroom photography way back before personal computers were even a glint in Steve Job’s or IBM’s corporate eye.

Week 2 – CAT 274

In This week, I have learned a good deal more about Dreamweaver, CSS and style rendering. My work was going great guns until I started removing the unneeded styles from the print.css file. I panicked (well, became anxious) when the layout I had been working on suddenly started disappearing. After closing the files and taking a breather on Facebook, I re-opened the files and finished the chapter. Although I wanted to print the file to be sure it had worked, I could not do it. The Render screen media type display looks good; the render print media type button looks sparse! I printed the screen to show this:

screen shot of DW print css week 2

Week 1 – CAT 274

The class really helped me to understand what I had read and worked through the week before. The ftp (I like George’s acronym – “For The People” better than the real thing – “File Transfer Protocol” – Chummier.)  article was hard to follow, but with the class discussion, it makes better sense to me now.

One of the difficulties I experienced with Chapter One of Classroom in a Book was the inability to edit except in Code view. When I used the designer mode, I could Highlight the Header, etc., but my typing did not change the text. After working halfway through the chapter in code (or split) view, I discovered that the Live View button was preventing WYSIWYG editing. Duh! Therefore, the chapter took a lot longer than the hour the book estimated. Since my plan was to finish the homework in lab on Wednesday, the snow prevented me from completing it until today. I played with the review questions somewhat, and have more confidence in Week 2.

This photograph was taken by my sister, Margie

On the last night of Camp Hope in California.

We were watching the camper families perform

In the closing ceremonies.

Hello world!

Welcome to nancy4l’s blog!

This is my first post.

Most of the day has been spent with friends: breakfast with Paul, Becky, Allen and Barry, morning with Marie, Webra, and Quicksilver cat, noon with Fran, afternoon with Sophie. Staying warm indoors as the temperature plummets.