Week 16A

Today in class we are going to go over the final critique of all our web pages. I am semi-happy with how mine turned out. I think my design reflects directly on my web designing abilities. I am completely new to all of this so I can'

t really complain with how it turned out.

Zurb Write Up

I went to the Zurb conference in Harrisburg a couple of months ago. I was disappointed that I spent money and wasted time going to this conference. I do not have anything bad to say about the speaker or what he spoke about. However, all of the information that he talked about was completely irrelevant to me. The main thing he talked about was how mobile devices are starting to play a bigger part in our lives so we need to create websites and apps that work well with those devices. He spoke about responsive design which ensures that your design will work everywhere. There are 3 key components to Responsive design. It has to be a flexible, fluid grid, include media styles that flex or scale, and media queries that adapt to the page. This kind of design is pushing the web forward. Designers are struggling with optimization though. Responsive design also is not as fast as native apps. Kelly spoke about mobile one which is a program that where everything is preset for mobile devices. He also described the Zurb design process which includes 5 steps. These steps are define, ideate, prototype, build, and analyze. I thought that the Matt Kelly did a very good job with the presentation and I do believe that people could have really learned from it if the information was relevant to them but I am not quite at the level where I should be attending conferences on this information yet.

Week 15B

During this class I put the finishing touch on my site. I rearranged a lot of the elements that I had on my page in the first place. I am really likeing the way things turned out this time as compared to before.

Week 15 Class A

Today in class I made some good progress on my website. I added more divs and got the whole layout a little bit more organized. All I really need to add at this point is the text based information and maybe a couple more pictures to keep the whole things balanced.

Outside of Class work

This week outside of class I finished up the layout of how I want my website to turn out. I tried to set up the html framework but I couldnt get it to work for some reason.

HTML and CSS hints via lynda.com

In the videos provided by lynda.com I learned multiple different things about web coding and I know am starting to understand everything that goes into it and what it is exactly. The informed me on exactly what cascading style sheets are and different types of things that I can do in order to make sure that CSS is used in the correct way. I know that HTML controls the document structure, and CSS, controls the look and feel. I learned that when you write CSS you are actually replacing default browser styling that has already existed. I learned all about the syntax of CSS and how it is properly set up. The videos also explained how HTML and CSS go hand in hand with each other. HTML is the language that makes it possible for different computers to communicate with each other. This, to my understanding, is the backbone of web coding. The lynda videos went in depth on how HTML is written and the different kinds of properties it can express. These properties include understanding whitespace and comments, displaying text with paragraphs, applying style to my HTML code, using block and inline tags, and Displaying characters with reference. The whole process of coding is very new to me. My knowledge barely exceeds copying and pasting code to edit a social networking page. I am starting to grasp how it actually works now. 

These past couple of classes...

So far in the past couple of classes I have learned a lot of different things. This whole coding thing is completely new to me so it is kind of challenging to grasp but it is slowly coming. I am starting to realize that this is really its own kind of language that is designed for the computer to understand. The whole process makes sense to me it is just a matter of memorizing the specific commands and what they actually do. Thus far I have learned how to set up a web page and design it, very basically,  through using css combined with my html code.

Today in class

Today in class we altered our first web page a little bit more and learned some new CSS tricks.

CSS101

Saul Bass Information

Josh Smith

Saul Bass Report

Due: 11/4/13

            Once described as being blessed with the ability to identify the one image that symbolized an entire movie, Saul Bass made a name for himself by taking something that was know to be bland and he made it exciting. Saul was born in 1920 in the Bronx district of New York. He spent the first part of his life trying to make it as a graphic designer in New York. He studied there under hungarian graphic designer, Gyorgy Kepes. Once he finished school he tried being a freelance designer in New york for a while after he held a couple apprenticeships for some Manhattan design firms. He found himself dealing with some creative constraints, so in 1946 he packed up and moved to Los Angeles to see what it had in store for him. In L.A., he worked as a freelance designer until he could afford to open up his own studio in 1950. Bass spent most of his time working in advertising until Preminger asked him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Preminger was impressed by what he received so he also allowed Bass to design the movie’s title sequence. This was his best work so far and allowed him to get the opportunity to design the titles for two movies in 1955. These movies were Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. His work on these films did bring him some fame but his next work would be his masterpiece. Otto Preminger’s controversial new drug movie, The man with the golden Arm, was released in 1955. Saul Bass created the titles for it by using an animated black paper cut out of a heroin addicts arm. This image was so powerful that it was chosen to be the first thing seen in this movie rather than the famous face of Frank Sinatra who played the main character in the movie. The movie title was a sensation. This single piece reinvented movie titles as an art form. Over the next decade he sharpened his skills by spending his time working on an animated mini movie for Mike Todd. This movie was called Around the World in 80 Days. He also spent time working on a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958  Bonjour Tristesse. Martin Scorsese once described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly recognizable and immediately tied to the film". Saul ended up dying in 1996. His New York Times obituary called him the “minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm into motion in 1995 and created an entire movie genre, and then elevated it into an art. Throughout his life he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Towards the end of his life he claimed that The Man with the Golden Arm sequence was “disappointing”. Though he might have felt that way, he will always be known as one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century.

Bibliography

Philip B Meggs, Six Chapters in Graphic Design: Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski, 1997

Gerry Rosentwieg and Saul Bass, The New American Logo, 1998

Today in class 10/28

Today in class we went over what HTML was and we were taught the beginning stages of coding.

404

Today in class I changed my 404 page a lot. I used my photo of my hookah and made it a silhouette to use as my photo element. I also created my home button in illustrator to fulfill that requirement.

This is what I came up with so far. I like the way it is coming out much more than before.

404 Page

I changed direction to a hookah website. These are my sketches I have come up with so far.

404 Error Page

This is what I came up with today in class. So far I am not very happy with the way it is turring out so I think I'm going to change direction and switch companies.

404 page design

Today in class we worked on thumbnails for a 404 error page that we need to design. I chose the company paper mate and am going to see what I can come up with for them.

October Calendar

Our object was to create a desktop calendar for the month of october. I started off kind of lost with what I wanted to do and I eventually ended up with a basic, clean argyle themed calendar. I am happy with the way it turned out because I love basic, minimalist designs and I think my calendar portrays that.

Logo Pen Tool Exercize

What we had to do this week was take a group of popular logos and reproduce them using the pen tool. This was pretty easy and more of a review exercise but it did help brush up on the pen tool skills.

Week 1B

Today in class we used the circle tool in Illustrator to create a collage of over 100 different circles. Mine came out sort of resembling a face in a way

Class Week 2A

This week we had to watch video tutorial on using Illustrator CS6 and they went over the following things:

Understanding Vectors

-Adobe Illustrator creates vector type product

-Vectors can be scaled to whatever size and still look just as good

Touring the Interface

-This movie took us on a tour all around the layout of illustrator and showed us how to navigate our way through the program

Using Rulers Guides and Grids

Guides

-Indicate where the document is supposed to be in the document

-Smart guides are available as well that snap your art into predetermined places

Rulers

-Show the dimensions of the document and where your cursor is on the

page

Grid

-Allows you to align objects in your document

-Appearance can be changed in the preferences menu

Locking and Hiding Artwork

- Hiding can be achieved by going to object>hide>selection

-Locking can be achieved by going to the layers panel and clicking the lockbox

Creating using artboards

- Support for multipage layouts

- Completely customizable

Using the direct selection tool

-Modifies the shape or object that you click on individually

Grouping Objects

- Allows you to modify multiple objects at one time

Resizing artwork

-Shows the multiple different ways and the rules to resizing your artwork

Rotating Objects

-Shows the different ways you can go about rotation your artwork

Aligning and distributing artwork

-Shows how to utilize some of the alignment commands to evenly distribute your art across your artboard

-Can be done with the control panel or the align window