Today we are beginning to design our website and create a mockup for our mini-crit. I have officially decided to do mine about the process of papermaking. I am hoping to go into the papermaking studio and start my own photos and videos but if not I have found a lot of resources on the internet to use. Since the website is interactive I want it to be about making homemade paper rather than the general process of making paper. I think this will make for a more interesting topic and design.
Allison Sutton
Today we began to brainstorm new ideas for our next project. Our topic is very broad and open to our choice as long as it shows a process/tells a story in a 10-scroll page. I am thinking about doing the process of papermaking. This process really tells the story of how something we take for granted in our daily lives is actually a really rich and historical process that is given a lot of thought and dedication when made by hand. I would be able to express this story by using images of the process; gifs, video, and applying a handmade feel to the site.
Crit for our navigation systems. Everyone did a really really good job and I was inspired by the creative thinking of my classmates. In interaction design, like other design disciplines, everything must be considered and have a purpose. There are so many little details to be thought out, not only visually but also how they function and are “human-centered” and made to be “user-experienced.” I think this was the most difficult part because either things weren’t there or they were there but served no purpose/in the wrong position. Overall, I think everyone did a really good job for our first navigation.
Another work day for our navigation systems. I am working on a system of circles (my favorite shape) and incorporating icons into my design since I enjoy those as well. The circles will function based on their topic and then narrow down deeper and deeper. I think that overall this is heading in the right direction but I think it needs more refinement.
Today was a work day for our navigation system/bars. We are working on the wireframing and refining how we want the interactions to work. I am working on making my design more compelling and interesting, with fewer clicks and better visuals. It is most important to have a design that draws the user in from the very beginning and make them want to click through and see the rest of the design. It is fun to think up these designs, but stressful to think about the coding work.
Today’s class we had a mini-crit on the navigation design iterations we made. It was difficult for me to visual how to draw out these navigations on paper and showing how to move from point A – point B. A lot of us shared similar designs, maybe because that is what we are most comfortable with seeing, “the standard.” I thought a lot of people had unique and interesting ways of exploring how a navigation system can break out of routine, such as the gardening and seed planting idea.
Surprise test! Very challenging – I have never taken a “test” like this before. It seems like most of the topics/people can overlap and relate to each other, which seemed to be the point of the test. It is interesting to think about the different ways that these topics connect and how they can form visuals in different ways, like the three ways we showed in our test. We are going to begin creating navigation systems soon and I think that will be a fun challenge. I never really gave much thought into the movement on websites but now that I am learning about it I have been very aware of how I move around the interface of a website. I am hoping to create something dynamic and interesting.
Exercise: writing code on the board in groups. This was super helpful! It is always easier to figure something out when there is a discussion between others. The part that is confusing me is the difference between a <div> tag and the different groupings of containers. I’m sure this will all come with practice. I do like the concept of building sites based on containers within containers. This is a great visual to keep in mind when things begin to start getting confusing.
Today in class we did an exercise where we changed the background colors in our website using the code that was already created by Colleen. These exercises are useful because it seems to be a lot easier to work this way rather than reading the textbook and not being able to visualize what we are learning. We also had a crit and discussed what types of navigation work will when it comes to interaction design. It is important to take into account the number of clicks/steps a person takes in order to discover information on a site.
During today’s class we went through several different websites that will really help up when it comes to designing the ascetics of a webpage. We have been learning about Google fonts and how to properly install them onto a webpage – which is pretty simple. Google Fonts is convenient in giving the user the exact codes that they need to just copy and past into the HTML and CSS. The only downside of Google fonts is that you have to download it onto the drive in order to preview what it looks like before seeing it live on the web.