Weel10 Videos

These Adobe inspired videos span the gamut.  Looking at the first:

The Complete Design Process: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1498v1658

My comments: this particular video is a thinly disguised commercial for Adobe…yet it is good to hear someone from the outside speak to the unspoken which is how Adobe products can be somewhat rationalized given that many of them were independently developed while others clearly demonstrate that the design teams within Adobe are independent and don’t always communicate; the end result show up in a myriad of product disconnects. Having personally worked for software companies in the past this behavior is not that surprising, but the costs of it all is unfortunately carried by the end-user community. Naming schemes end up being not compatible, functionally differs across products needed to accomplish the same thing, and Adobe design teams come up with different solutions to the same problems complicating matters.

Obviously Adobe is well aware of these complex issues but progress is always slow when you have a large turf (market share) to contend with and a lot of existing product inventory to protect from immediate obsolesces. Adobe products thus are both a blessing and a curse to work with.

In short I would skip this video. All you need to know is that you can share certain elements across Adobe’s platforms. Perhaps Adobe or some third party could publish a one or two paragraph list and you would be done with it in 30 seconds of reading rather then a 12 minute video dancing around the issue. Or better yet Adobe could just issue a one page press release.

Creating Interactive Prototypes: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1498v1660

Comments: good video presentation – very practical and very informative.

Rapid Prototyping: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1498v1659

Comments on above video: A lot going on within this video and I will need to review again…to observe some of the ’slight of hand’. I wish that Adobe would make a transcript also available of the ground covered here…

Information and Interaction Design: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1498v1661

Comments: Contains some good time saving tips using Symbols.

Dreamweaver Integration: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1592v1752

My comment:  Again this video slips into the variety of Adobe product commercial:  The key message is: Dreamweaver is integrated with other Adobe products – at least in a few instances!  At least they show one or two where this is the case.

Week9 Videos

I found them all useful with the exception of the first – this video is not performing well from the Adobe site and continued to lock up.  Don’t know if others are having the same problem with Smart Guides and Tool tips video.

Week9 Articles

All the articles were interesting, but I found the listing of fonts and the ability to link to view them particulary useful.

OLA Comp Update

Changes made to this project (see below) include class room feedback to include:

1. Use of a better simplfied logo
2. enlarged and balanced position of the rowing photo (represents team effort and demonstrates a lot of moving parts behind AACC and inclusive of both men and woman)
3. Switched orientation of Banner links and Navigation links – to provide user a better orientation
4. Added a News Link at the top and a Calendar Link

Not quite sure at the moment as to how a calendar can be brought into Dreamweaver.  Will have to cross that birdge latter.)

Week9 Book Exercises (6 & 7)

Chapter 6:  Adding Interactivity

A fairly mind numbing exercise and tedious chapter.  The results can be found here:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/cat18/week9/santorini.html

Chapter 7: Creating a Page Layout

This chapter represents the meat and potatoes of Dreamweaver when it comes to layout.  These chapters suffer from a lack of a creative voice in the writing and presentation of the concepts.   Given the financial strength and technical prowess of Adobe and its engineering staff,  it’s surprising that they can not seem to do better with their text books.  I don’t anticipate a best seller for Adobe in the near future

The results of the exercise can be found at:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/cat18/week9/layout_start.html

Wee8 Faculty Template Design

Below is my first attempt at this design exercise.   I tired to create a somewhat subtle background – to keep the site from appearing too flat.  The small image of crew team is added to suggest that at AACC there are a lot of moving parts that require team work in this very active community.

http//bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/cat18/week8/gsherry_faculty_template.jpg

Week8 Readings

The article below was quite informative and beautifully written, unusual combination when it comes to writings on technical issues

Dao of Web Design – a timeless article from A List Apart:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dao/

Principles of Beautiful Web Design:
Chapter 5: Imagery

Jasons book will continue to serve as an excellent quick reference on a number of design topics to keep me on track.  His treatment of CSS and borders should prove useful as well.

Week8 In-Class Design Comp

This is a good exercise in getting us one step closer to designing our web sites and provides some additional familiarity with the program FireWorks.

The results can be seen here:

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/cat18/week8/design.png

I notice that I need to have Quicktime software runnning to view this file on my machine at home… and that I could not save it as a HTML file in Fireworks.  I wonder why Fireworks would not allow use to save the file as a HTML file?  Would  this not make it easier for more people to view it?

Using CSS for Design (Week7)

CSS – or Cascading Stylesheets - are a set of predefined rules that guide the design, type and layout of your page. CSS can be used to control basic page defaults, the layout of a page, the design of a menu system, and much more.

The two videos suggested for CSS review include:

• Intro to CSS ( approx 30 mins ) – a great overview of semantics and selectors, done in CS3, but it covers some of the basic concepts!
• Intro to CSS ( part 2 – approx 30 mins ) – from comp to finished product, also done with CS3, but covers many of the basics!

I think that the information contained in these two Greg Rewis videos are so fundamental that I would suggest viewing them before ever touching the DreamWeaver software.  They provide what Adobe rarely provides: the theory behind the design so that you can adapt to numerous design opportunities/challenges.  (Greg manages to get you through the dry spots of CSS via humorous comments as he moves along through his presentations.)

I would go one step further.  View ealy in our CAT274 program and then again during Week 7.

Week7 Lession5 – Navigation

Core web material is setting up links and navigation bars.  This chapter 5 also introduces the role of AJAX (not the cleaner), and Spry in simplifying the amount of code needed in a web site.  I suppose that this is a good thing…as user benefits are really ever mentioned in Adobe’s manuals or the reason behind a given way of doing things.  Adobe’s sense of humor is evident once again in its estimates of needed time to complete any given chapter – in this one one hour.

Granted I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer…but I find the one hour estimate may be good if you work for Adobe and you were part of the design team.

The result of this exercise can be seen here .