Grades: Designing for Web Standards

This month was hard. It was more or less learning the concepts and understanding the concepts behind Cascading Style Sheets. And I won't lie, it was frustrating. Even though I bombed the second quiz (and YES, I did study), I ended up getting an A, so I'm very, very happy and thankful. The teacher is a cool guy, even though he can be a little rough at some times. He definitely strikes me as someone who is a tough-love kinda' guy. He'll make you cry. Not even kidding. But it was all worth it... Moving on!

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Month 11: History of Visual Communications

Lab 1: Art Nouveau

Okay, so things were a little crazy with the break. Tuesday, we went to the Morse Museum to get some inspiration for our first Art Nouveau project. It's a little bookmark, and we have to make it styled the same way as the general period, even though there are multiple styles. It gives us a bit of creative freedom. However, it can be a little confusing, because they're actually looking for Artist Statements and stuff about your project.

I've finished my project, I think. I may add onto it, however I'm going to wait for a final critique. Here's what it looks like for the time being.

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Month 11: History of Visual Communications

Hi everyone! So this is my last Gen-Ed class. So far, we haven't really done anything, so I don't have anything fancy to really show off. Last month, I had to take off. My video card fried and the school didn't have any loaner laptops for me to use. I guess that's one bad thing about Full Sail.

If your stuff magically stops working, you're screwed. Unless you're in CA / GA. Then you have open labs. But this wasn't the case for me...

But, all in all, I suppose it was a good thing I was "forced" to take a month off. My dad has cancer, so I've been taking the time to go over and help him, and take care of some things.

Anyhow. Happy belated Thanksgiving to you all. I look forward to doing the holiday thing this year, and hopefully I can create some beautiful festive digital composites for you! I'll keep you posted as the month progresses!

See you then!

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Month 10: Designing for Web Standards

So this month has been pretty relaxed. Apparently, the first Exam is supposed to be hard, but I found that it isn't if you study the material. The instructor gives several links an an eBook that are really beneficial. I especially love the O'Reilly series. Studying for several hours for about three days helped me to get a 100% on the first Exam. It's only hours before the second, and I'm feeling confident. I thought I'd take a few minutes to make a post about the work that I've done before I get back to my Lynda videos.

So each lab in this class touches on particular aspects and categorizes CSS in a way that's beneficial and easy to learn. There are some concepts that were challenging to grasp at first, such as the Cascade and Specificity, but once I understood them at their roots, I felt a lot better about the class and information came a lot easier.

So below, is a complete list of links for what I've done for this class. The requirements were that we only had to make these links work for Firefox, so apologies to those of you who use Chrome or something else. I'll be sure to go back in and add my vendor prefixes later, so check back!

Lab 1: Color
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab1/index_linked.html

Lab 2: Typography
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab2/index.html

Lab 3: Floating
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab3/index.html

Lab 4: Gradients
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab4/index.html

Lab 5: Responsive Design
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab4/index.html

Lab 6: Forms
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-1/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-2/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-3/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-4/

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Month 10: Designing for Web Standards

This class is, the easiest and yet the hardest class I've had, both at the same time. There's a constant balance of love and hate, and an overwhelming sense of fear that I'm going to fail this class. The teacher is very organized and presents the information in a clear, concise manner that is easy to understand. And while code is little more than memorization of a few selectors, properties and values, the semantics behind why you do what you do, is certainly the more complicated aspect of CSS. Learning specificity, and how the Cascade works, are some of the harder concepts to grasp, especially when things start to get really complicated.

For labs, we've been doing the CSS for a couple of websites. The websites are only one page each, but I still try to make them look nice. Oh, and I forgot to mention, the class only requires that we make them usable in Firefox, so if there's a few gradients missing, that's because it's not coded for Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. Apologies about that. I'll get them updated ASAP. :)

Lab 1: Color
Lab one was all about color. I've already been doing a little CSS, on and off, for approximately two years, so I continued to familiarize myself with the properties and values. To view Lab 1, click here: http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab1/index_linked.html

Lab 2: Typography
Lab two focused on typography. Kevin taught us how to use custom fonts, though I should probably look into how to use @font-face a little bit more. Still, it was an easy enough project, and there's not much to say except for showing you the website, itself: http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab2/

Lab 3: Layout
Lab three started on the fundamentals of layout for our site, where we used floating to create a two-column layout. I lost points on this particular lab because I didn't make my gallery horizontal, but vertical instead. After all the trouble I went through with the sidebar, and the need to study for an Exam that was 15% of my entire grade, I just left it as is, weighing my priorities towards the Exam, which I was told I did very well on. http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab3/

Lab 4: CSS3 Gradients
This lab focused on CSS gradients. Basically, we had to do multiple things with CSS3. It was fairly easy, and I'm updating this later than I usually would, so I don't exactly remember the specifics of the lab. But you can view it here:
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab4/

Lab 5: Responsive Web Design
What's really quite a shame about this particular project was that I was absent for this day. Basically, we had to make the webpage from Lab 3 responsive, so that depending on the device that you used, its layout would be optimized.
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab5/

Lab 6: Web Forms
Okay, so by far, this was my favorite lab. I don't know why, but I love to do web forms. Please keep in mind that these forms are best viewed in Firefox and will not work as intended in Chrome, Safari or any other explorer. There were four forms that we had to do, each getting to be more advanced than the one before. I have to say, that styling the drop-down menu items were extremely difficult, and I was too lazy to style any of the radio buttons / checkboxes.
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-1/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-2/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-3/
http://lrroberts0122.github.com/DWS/lab6/level-4/

Au revoir and thanks for reading!

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Grades: Web Design Fundamentals

False alarm! This is actually an A+! :)

*Update: Lab 2 is portrayed as a zero right now. There was a mistake when submitting the grades, so the updated version should be available within the month.

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Month 9: Intellectual Property and Law

This month has been an extremely easy month. I'm only about half way through. The class is extremely helpful in regards to how you can protect your rights as a designer. They talk a lot about Intellectual Property (go figure), about trademarks, registration and copyright. For lab each day, we are required to fill out a questionnaire that reinforces the subjects taught in class that day. I personally love the teacher. She's really sweet, and very cool.

There is literally no homework for this class, so if you're extended, it's really just a break. I've been taking some time to try and freelance. I've been working for a YouTube sensation, RhinoCrunch. I love his DayZ videos, and he needed an artist to design his website. I've been collaborating with an employee from Opace, a web development firm from the UK, so this project has proven very useful for me. Right now, all I can do is post an image of the site, but when it's live, I'll link it here.

I'm very excited. This is the first website that I've designed that will actually be fully developed.

If you're interested in who RhinoCrunch is, and what he's about, check out his YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/user/rhinocrunch

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