Archive for January, 2008

Visual Design - Web 2.0 Design Style

With the advent of “Web 2.0” new design styles have emerged. Just as I showed with the case study on Tuesday (garyengbergoutdoors.com old and new), design styles are becoming more sophisticated. Ben Hunt from Web Design from Scratch shares his perspective with a Web 2.0 Style Guide and he outlines some basic principles to consider.


Eastbay Interface for Redesigning

I apologize. I had this image in a not-so-easy to find spot on the blog (bad information architecture, right? And thanks for pointing that out Noel). Click on the image for a larger version of the interface that you can print. It’s a little fuzzy, but it will work for our purposes.


1/24 Lecture Notes & Homework

As mentioned in class, you homework is to begin sketching a redesign for this webpage. Use the discovery questions from today’s lecture as a starting point and then sketch away.
For reading, please read Don’t Make Me Think, chapters 1-3.
And for those of you interested in the Poynter Institute study, you can view a short video […]


Usability and Emotional Design

Many in the web communication world feel there is a difference between usability and aesthetics. In fact, the “grandfather” web usability, Jakob Nielsen, PhD. often has promoted pure function as being the most important attribute of creating an user interface.
His partner, Don Norman, PhD. author of the Design of Everyday Things had been in this […]


1/24 Lecture

For our second class, we’ll touch on the following topics:

a (very) brief history of the web
the web as an evolving communication tool (e.g., the way back machine, blogging, social networking, grape radio and more)
web teams (what roles are necessary for an effective web team?)
the core process for creating effective communications (the 4 Ds
and what we […]


You are now all authors

I have set all of your permissions so you can log into the site. You can create, edit and delete your posts. Additionally, you will be able to upload files using the Wordpress upload feature. I’ll demo that for you on Thursday.  Make sure to get the books and stay warm.


Let the Semester Begin

Welcome to Life Sciences Communication 532: Web Design for the Sciences. I am looking forward to an exciting semester. We are going to cover a lot of ground (and you’ll see there is much to cover). We will focus our energy on learning many concepts professional communicators in the web/new media industries need to know.We […]


Who are you?

To practice using the blog, I would like you to add a comment to this post. Please introduce yourself. Tell us where you are from, what your major is, what your status/year in school is, what you hope to gain in this course this semester and what you hope to do for a career.  And […]


Critiques

To critique means to carefully evaluate or to analyze. It is not a bad thing to have your ideas critiqued. For many burgeoning creative people, criticism can be debilitating if it is connected to personal feelings of worth. Remember that criticism is not a value judgement. It is simply a statement of interpretation about the […]


Learning Photoshop

Are you new to Adobe Photoshop? This will be a key software for this class and will be using it right from the start to create interface designs. While I will offer some tech clinics in class, they will only be a starting point for you. You are responsible for building your skills outside of […]