Employment

Well to be honest, employment in Evansville is awful. I went to every place in the phone book that relates to graphic and web design, and nobody is hiring. Plus, I only have an Associate Degree and most places are looking for a Bachelor's Degree. I'd rather take the path of acquiring an internship to gain some years of experience, while working full-time to be able to afford the neccessary requirements to make it in this industry. Plus, when the recession ends there should be more opportunities. I would seek employment in other areas of the world, but I'm in love and I'd rather work a stupid boring job that pays the bills instead of getting a high paying job somewhere without her.

Web Browsers

Everybody has their own decision when it comes to what's best web browser wise. Firefox is the most highly recommended browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. I got a buddy who swears up and down Google Chrome is the best. Chrome eliminates the extra things incorporated into a web browser which makes it very easy to search for things and simplify your experience. Flock has a built-in photo uploader, blog editor, and a big sidebar to keep up with social networking. Opera is a smaller file size and is recommended for older PC's or Macs that require less to keep optimal. Internet Explorer is about the second most common browser, with the newer version having updated security features. I would recommend Firefox, and maybe all of the others if you are a web designer so you can see what your design looks like on a multitude of different applications.

Design, Usability, Accessibility

Web sites are basically places on the internet that encourage other viewers to participate in a certain activity. In terms of design, web design is related to, and different from, print design like as in magazines and what not. The design aspect of web sites is the same as in print design as in terms of making the visual appearance of the site visually appealing and eye-catching. You might decide to draw out the design, and then instead of pressing Ctrl+P to print your design you would basically open your text editor and FTP program to code and orchestrate your design.

Usability basically refers to the ability to navigate through a web site, whether it's easy to do that, or not so easy. There's more to navigation than just links, it's also about how your navigation leads your viewer through the page. There's basically three aspects your web site should have, a past, a present, and a future. Your viewer should be able to go to your site and know where they are presently, know where they will click on to take them to the future, and after visiting your site and they leave, how will they remember their past? So, in short, think your design through and no matter how hard things seem to get, stay focused and keep giving it all you have to make things easier for others.

Accessibility is about how accessible your web site is. If you have only standard links, then blind people may not be able to understand your links. They now have created voice overs, that when activated, every time you scroll over a link a voice will tell you what the link relates to. So, keep in mind, whatever you design on your web site might relate to you and seem very readily accessible to you, but just keep in mind you have an entire crowd of people viewing your page so it must be able to be accessible to anybody and everybody.

Web Typography

In comparison to the past, the present and the future of web typography has gained many excellent advantages and options the past simply lacked. In the older times, we had to stick to a very simple font. Now, we can use a multitude of fonts, and we can also alter their position, space, contrast, size, and hierarchy. Internet Explorer uses embedded type to where a viewer can view the web page designed by the designer and view his font, but they won't be able to download and steal the designer's font. Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome use a font-face property that lets the web designer use whatever fonts he has on his system, and if the viewer has the same font it will be displayed in that font. If the font is not on the viewers computer, it will try each subsequent font specified by the web designer, and if none of the fonts are available it will use simply the default font. The future of web typography has a big climax coming soon, in my opinion. Now, we are having to specify fonts, code them, make sure our viewers have the fonts, and so on and so forth. One day somebody, hopefully me, will get rich off of making everything far simpler. Maybe a law passing that every browser has to interpret information equally. Then, they can create a program similar to Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, to where you basically create your web page, in a specified window size, and then convert your graphic to a web page in the click of a button. Why we haven't created a solution to this problem still boggles me, and will boggle me until my brain stops working, or they develop the simple software to do such a thing. We have gaming systems in our cars and toasters that hold eight pieces of bread, but no attempt at a software program to simplify web design more into graphic design. Think about that one for a bit...

The Psychology & Meaning of Color

I found the articles that I read to be sort of a recap, but still very interesting and a useful resource. There are many different colors and feelings that they convey, but for now let's focus on the most important colors, the basic ones. Red gives a feeling of fire, energy, danger, heat, warning, and power. Too much of this color can lead to being overwhelmed, so use in moderation. Blue gives the feeling of loyalty, tranquility, trust, peace, sky and sea. Too dark of a blue can convey a variance of the noted feelings. Orange is the color of energy, autumn, construction, joy, and sunshine. This is a color that you can use when trying to do a site for a construction company or for a site where you want a feeling of energy. Green gives the feeling of money, grass, environmentally friendly, healing, freshness, fertility and envy. I don't see how envy falls into the mix, but maybe others would envy somebodies money? Black is a color of power, stability, and strength. It is VERY easy to overwhelm someone with this color, so again use this one with moderation. White can convey creativity and cleanliness. So, my suggestion would be to start out with the design project, and the purpose of the project and any feelings that you might want to convey, then incorporate that into your color selections for your design project. There are many color tools available to us graphic and web designers and my favorite one is the color picker in Photoshop and Illustrator. It lets you basically select any shade of any color in any variance, and it also gives you a hex value so you can use whatever colors you want in your design project.

Art Directing the Web

I found the articles very interesting and informative. I liked how he mentions the "golden rule", which is when you have a 1x1.68 square, you can break it down into another golden ratio, over and over again that creates a great design grid for a web pages information, or even for a web site layout. I also really like the idea of art directing the web. With more people involved on a design project, teamwork achieves a higher rate of success in comparison to working alone. Also, better work is performed because each person has an individual task, and can focus more on getting that one aspect perfect. If you did the project alone, you would quickly perform design steps, some in a rush, to get the project done on time. I also liked that one guy's video where he talks about different viewpoints of a web site, and print in comparison. Once something is printed, people see it from one single viewpoint. In comparison, a web site can be viewed from different size monitors, different devices such as Iphones, laptops, desktops, and so on. These stipulations really do have a solid impact on how we must design pages. He also mentioned you can take a picture and divide it into six even segments to create equal points of visual interest. I disagree, to some extent, because what if you have a composition that has visual interest on mainly the right side, or the top or the bottom? If you create your six segments then create your composition to have equal sides of visual interest, I could see that helping distribute visual interest.

Music Band, Richard Carpenter, Funky Layout

In the music band tutorial it demonstrates how to make a web page that represents a band. It was a very helpful, easy to follow tutorial that really does a good job of creating a grungy effect, with access to make a easy to follow page. Not only did I find the tutorial effective, I think the results of it's completion give the web page extra credit as far as being well designed.

In Richard Carpenter's tutorial on creating a portfolio web site he demonstrates how to create a page layout that really is quite extraordinary. He goes through step by step on making these neat buttons that really pop off the page. He also goes over how to make these really cool rectangles that help keep your headings popping off the page and organized as well. I also really liked how he shows how to create these icons, all that are stock in Photoshop tools, and then convert them into really eye popping icons with transparent white rectangles and a very neat glowing effect.

The funky layout tutorial was a very great tutorial that demonstrated how to make some cool graphics and navigation menu bars. First, you start by making these black and gray rectangles that really pop off the page. Second, you arrange text on top ofthe rectangles, as well as an icon to separate each word. Third, you are given these neat brushes to create a splatter effect. I would recommend this tutorial to almost anybody. The only downside to it was you have to pay two dollars. :( However, two dollars well spent. :)