Weekend Festivities

Were there really wasn't that much...

I did finally finish the last Harry Potter book. I enjoyed most of it, a bit slow-going at the beginning, but the wizard duels etc, etc, seemed appropriate for the finale of a seven book series.

I managed to get my hands on a Swiss version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Having just seen the fifth movie two weeks ago and just finished the final book, I thought it would be fun to contrast how much the actors have grown and also to see if there were anything that would make sense now that I know the entire story that would've been imperceptible back then. The only thing I noted was the use of Dumbledore's deluminator and of coures, Ron receives it in the final book. However, I just started re-reading the first book also and it was certainly called a different name then.


I very much enjoyed the movie.

I also randomly ran across the great website of a webdesigner/graphic designer/coder named Jonathan Harris. Looking at his work, I noticed that he has responsible for many of the things that I find wonderful in interaction design including:
1)10X10 a news aggregator 2) the graphic layout/interface of etsy.com 3)some mints I noticed at the airport called oral fixation

and finally I really enjoyed wefeelfine.org which scours the blogosphere for the phrase "i feel" and creates graphical representations to analyze the data and to look at what people across the world are feeling right now.

friday

I discovered that a lot of people are creating PDF magazines. Its a great way to get graphic design inspiration. I loved the Candy Collective mag's feature on the use of Helvetica font through the years.
This site has a great listing and links. I also really love Adobe's PDF magazine for design professionals.



"You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years"

a more design centered blog

I really ought to have a stronger point of view for this blog.
The last few months have taught me much about the strength of messaging and the importance of a strong point of view.

I thought I would just list some sites that I visit everyday:

Notcot.org

is a very visually stunning and daily updated design journal. I like it because it doesn't have words and I usually just get eyecandy

Popurls

is an aggregator of aggregators. I tried fiddling with Netvibes or with igoogle, but popurls is punchy. Besides I usually only read the Reddit entries , and if I feel like catching up on more webdev stuff, probably delicious.com

Gmail

I love Gmail. It is the best web client out there, and it is awesome, I dont need anythign else

website creation

I dont usually talk about work related things, but I thought I would like to document my webcreation process. Throughout college, I've always been amazed by well-designed websites. It didn't seem that complicated to me, as almost invariably most of these websites were created by "graphic designers", thus, must not be that complicated.

I decided to take on the challenge of re-designinging my company website. First I had to learn CSS as i had learned from a product designer/ web developer friend that it is the new standard for web design. So I looked it up. I'm not sure what entirely the benefit of it is, other than the actual process of learning CSS "containers", floating and creating layout in general, has afforded a new way of design. It is indeed much more flexible to redesign the individual elements of a website and really, the table based design of HTML days of yore really is quite cumbersome.

So I learned CSS all of last week.
I had a tutorial from my webdev friend a few months ago where he taught me the difference betweens and classes and ids. Pretty much this is all you need to know to do CSS.

I then went and tagged websites that were very well done.
Smashing Magazine has some very good resources for web inspiration. I then also looked for company websites in my company's "category" of products and sought for inspiration there. Most designs in that category were simply lackluster, but it is best to keep this in mind, as our clientelle would probably be more intimidated than impressed by a fashion forward website.

I then had to learn the nuts and bolts of CSS. So I delicioused CSS and true enough, it was a gold mine of resources. For any webdevs out there, I hihgly recommend using delicious for all your researching needs. My two favorite websites for this are:
1) HTML Dog and 2) W3 Schools. These two sites will give you everything you need to know to catch up on sites.

Then came the bewildering idea of how to handle tables now that CSS has completely obliterated tables. For some reason, the idea of floating was completely bewildering to me and some websites were simply floating left and floating right; this is a completely different way of doing it with tables. Somehow this website explained everything I needed to know .

Then came the problem with Menus. I liked the idea of having drop down menus as they look streamlined and allow for easier navigation. I liked Stu Nicholl's site for its amazingly extensive collection of open source Menus completely done in CSS. However, I wanted to do a combination of text and images rollovers and this site albeit butt ugly looks promising.

Finally, I also had to learn flash because my boss wanted me incorprate it into its website. This site was surprisingly the most straightforward way to learn flash. Then I wanted to get ambitious and add clickable elements to my swf. Amazingly Adobe has a very rich collection of video resources that I highly recommend. Talk about taking advantage of their own platform (so awesome).

I absolutely love the internet. If I run into any problem I simply google it and I can pretty much find a little forum somewhere, or a tutorial site that discusses the very problem I have. How amazing when you create an entirely open platform.