Jamie learns the ways of the web - Day 2

Learn HTML, CSS and Javascript - Day Two

Today was my second day on the steer course, and the pace has already picked up quite quickly. I cant believe how much I've achieved in two days. My first task this morning involved us all making a very simple site, which was created yesterday into a responsive version, and I cant believe how simple it was. However, the next part of today's lesson involved us creating a more complex responsive site from scratch, which I found a lot harder to understand. I stuck with it though, and at the end of the day I'd built a fully working responsive site. Chuffed!

In Tomorrow's lesson we will be finishing off the site we worked on today by adding other things we are yet to learn such as forms & tables and then it's onto the parallax site! Exciting stuff!

Jamie's goes for web training at Steer.me

We sent Jamie off to Steer to kick start his web skills to go hand in hand with his existing Graphic Design role. He agreed to keep us updated along the way.

Day One

My first day on the steer course was great, i've already built two websites. Ok, they aren't going to win any awards, thats for sure, but it is a massive personal goal that I have been trying to achieve for some time. By the end of this week, I should (hopefully) be able to build a fully responsive site, a parallax scrolling site and also an eCommerce site and judging by the pace of today's lesson(s) I'm very hopeful of achieving it.

I was pretty nervous going into the first day of the course today, but the Steer team put me right at ease and everyone else in the class were really friendly, which helped a lot. I was surprised that most of the people on this weeks course aren't actually from a design related background and are merely there to learn more about how websites are made and to learn the terminology processes behind building various styles of websites.

Overall, a great first day and I look forward to learning some more web skills as the week goes on.

10 points to consider when redesigning a website

When redesigning an existing website, you'll often want to start afresh. However, you risk losing useful elements.

It's good practice to perform a thorough site review to ensure you keep the great bits of an existing site, protect your client's ability to amend and maintain the site, as well as developing the brand in the best way possible.

Let's look at how we can appraise a site prior to redeveloping it. Each of the following points will help to develop a cohesive plan and ensure your next project goes without a hitch.

http://www.netmagazine.com/features/10-points-consider-when-redesigning-website

10 ways to back up your design work

Originally posted on www.creativebloq.com (http://www.creativebloq.com/design/back-up-3132218) Monday, 25th March, 2013 

Guard against lost work and back up your files. You know it makes sense: here are the best ways to go about it…

http://www.sushkelly.co.uk/10-ways-to-back-up-your-design-work/

Birds... thousands of em!

When Jo was leaving work the other night she noticed something odd in the sky. It turned out to be a massive flock of starlings! It reminds me of a comedy bee swarm from a cartoon :)

We are looking for a Junior Graphic Designer

If you graduate this year in a  design related discipline, here’s your first brief:

Choose 3 examples of your own work that you love the most. They won’t necessarily be the ones with the best grades or the most praise – maybe no one’s ever even seen them before – maybe the idea is still in your head – this is your chance to give it life.

So if you have a good sense of humour and want to be part of a great team, then please send your CV and portfolio straight away to sarah@imaginate.uk.com

Please include salary expectations. No agencies.

Ignorance is bliss...

I stumbled upon oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com today,  courtesy of @despens a Tumblr blog showing screen shots from old Geocities homepages. I felt a wave of nostalgia as I remembered the awkward, primitive  sites, the men at work under construction pages, brash web safe colours and framesets with thick borders... oh and of course spinning logo gifs!

I had literally just finished looking at the slick and forward thinking jquery conference site http://events.jquery.org/2013/uk/, making use of bleeding edge technology, the HTML5 History API and some beautiful CSS animation.

It struck me just how far we have moved on over the last 15 years and got me thinking, are the new breed of web designers who have never known this distant past at an advantage over the "oldies" who were creating sites back at the birth of the web?

You weren't there maaaaan!

Generally, those who have built websites for over 10 years will have have battled through the early "browser wars", spent countless hours trying to slice and dice a brochure and make it pixel perfect. There has been so much learning by mistake, splash pages for example and then the sweeping advances of Shockwave and Flash.

We are the new wave, we are the future

Those who are free of these battle scars seem to have an element of freedom to their work, the hard yards have been made and we now have web fonts, decent css and by and large reasonable browser compliance (in recent editions). The tools are there and thought patterns are not restricted by the old rules that used to apply.

It's six of one and half a dozen of the other

As the latest twist in the saga takes shape (Responsive Web Design) designers new or old are coming together, pushing the boundries further and trying to impart the new found methods and knowledge on clients, agencies and anyone else who will listen! And it really seems as though people are starting to listen. Zeldman, Paul Boag and the likes have ben banging the drum for quite a while and it must be satisfying to finally see the new generation of designers who are completely sold on semantic markup, usable and content rich websites

Web Design continues to forge it's own path and move further away from being an extension of print design. It is no longer something any designer can turn their hand to as more and more skills are needed and less print skills are transferrable.

Although this constant evolution means you never feel like you know it all, it is an amazing area of design to work in and we should relish the challenges we face each day...

I won't however miss trying to align a horrible table of images and shims in Netscape Communicator and IE4!!