John Abbott College
It’s taken me time to find my calling, which is turning ideas into design.
I originally studied Creative Arts at CEGEP, I tried Art History at McGill University and I spent a year learning about Fashion Design at Lasalle College. One thing always stayed the same: I’ve never strayed from the creative field. I have the experience of having tried different things.
Continue reading “Natalie Heather Davis – Turning ideas into design”A basic set of vocabulary terms used in web design and development.
People often start their design career by learning Adobe software—namely Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.
Those applications are all over twenty years old. They were built with predetermined paper-based (or eventually with fixed pixel-based) sizes in mind. The apps weren’t developed with the notion that the page’s size can vary.
On the other hand, designing for a digital screen implies that the virtual page we work on is responsively resizing. In other words, whether you display your design on a smartphone, a tablet or a desktop computer – or you hold the device in portrait or landscape mode – the screen shape is isn’t the same.
Every designer weened on visually building fixed layouts faces the challenge of suddently having to previsualize a set of shifting rectangles before starting to build them out of code in order to be able to see them in the first place.
This new conceptual and analytical skillset is often diametrically opposed to the coordinated visual and gestural mouse-weilding skills that originally got students interested in visual design.
Adobe XD’s Responsive Resize feature lets designers visually create fluid layouts that adapt across different screen sizes and layout ratios using familiar drawing tools like the rectangle and circle.
Responsive Resize lets a whole range of previously acquired design skills suddenly translate to the dynamic nature of interactive screen layout and design.
Check it out and leave your comments below.
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics, or meaning, of the information in webpages and web applications rather than merely to define its presentation or look. Semantic HTML is processed by traditional web browsers as well as by many other user agents. CSS is used to suggest its presentation to human users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML
For web design students, there are many career option when considering the universe of the World Wide Web. Front-end development, back-end development, front-end design… the options are many.
For those who wish to do more than only the visual layout of screens using tools like Sketch, the Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (and so many others) there is one constant: writing good HTML.
However, there is a distinction to be made. Not all HTML performs the equally in terms of search engine optimization, and not all HTML is easy for people to read.
Continue reading “What is Semantic HTML?”Explore Rachel Manning’s detailed picture of the web industry in Dissecting Front-end Job Titles.
Web Designer — Probably went to school for graphic design. This role has mostly been replaced by UI design since the rise of appreciation for good user experience.
UX Designer — Often a researcher that brings the site to the stage of wireframes and prototypes.
UI Designer — Designs the look and feel of the site, often creating an advanced prototype.
Although it starts off mostly talking about Computer Science students, the discussion of design and interactivity careers is very good. It’s an important read for soon-to-be graduates interested in web careers.
Soon you will be meeting teams of people. All of them with very different responsibilities and skills. This article helps differentiate the forest from the trees.
The moment you choose to get into web design and development, you choose to enter a universe of endless connections in between machines scattered across the globe.
There is you at your computer, and then there is everything else on the internet. By definition, the rest of the internet is “remote” to you dear reader of this post.
So, once again by definition, web design is a career where all the important stuff happens on other machines – on “remote web servers” usually – and being able to connect to such a machine to create and edit files and folders as well as manage transfers of data from machine to machine is a valuable skill.
The most efficient tool for logging into any remote computer is the CLI (“command-line interface“) which you gain access to when you start an application called the Terminal.
Continue reading “Basic BASH Terminal commands for Web Designers”This is an old video I posted many years ago to my own web site. It is – I believe – the most popular post I have ever created. At last count, the video has over twenty-five thousand hits. I had the step-by-step written tutorial on my site back then and I lost track of how many times it was the most popular thing on my web site each month.
This is a beginner’s tutorial on how to create a valid HTML 5 template that uses PHP includes (“require” actually) that assembles the code on the server. This gives designers the opportunity to build a theme (or “skin”) that can manage the look of an entire web site – large or small.
This type of coding is a stepping-stone exercise in between coding HTML by hand and having a fully dynamic database-driven site, such as WordPress, or a custom content management system (“CMS”).
Enjoy.