The Mac lab in Building 10 has been restored and classes will resume there as of today, Monday 18th May.
The Mac lab in Building 10 was broken into last night with the result being that we cannot conduct our tutes in 10A23A.
The Tutorial people have found alternative labs for us to use. Below is the timetable they have provided with the relocated tutorials. Tutorial times remain the same, just the room has changed.
The suggestion to extend the deadline for the website received no opposition, so the new deadline is now the same date as the Blog Theme project:
Week 15 Friday 5th June before 5pm
To submit, put a link to your finished music festival site on your blog.
To submit your web design project, just add a post to your blog with a link to your finished festival site.
Don’t change your Website link in your Profile page for this site, that should stay as your blog.
I’ve had a few enquiries regarding web hosting options which I thought would be worth publishing here.
James Allen has his own domain + hosting sorted (www.wheresmyspaceship.com) and was wondering if a friend could use a “subsomain” for the project. The simple answer is Yes. A subdomain adds a prefix to the main domain, like: http://friend.wheresmyspaceship.com. Using a sub-directory would also work: www.wheresmyspaceship.com/friend A sub-directory is simply a folder on the webserver.
There is always the possibility of grouping together with a few friends and buying a domain+hosting collectively, then using either a subdomain or sub-directory for each of your sites.
Buying a domain + hosting is not essential for completion of the project, however, you do need to host your site somewhere on the web. Luke Bartley asked about the free web hosting that students used last year. It is called freehyperspace.com but I’m not sure that it is still operational - the “Closed for maintenance” sign seems to be a permanent fixture. Do a Google search for “free web hosting” to find others. Some require that you have a domain name, while others will insert horrible banner ads into your design, but you might be able to find something adequate for the project.
If you have found good hosting add a comment here.
Colour management is a big part of digital photography and print production workflows. It is not so relevant to web graphics and it is worth ensuring that Photoshop’s colour settings are not meddling with your web graphics.
Here is a good post about how to set Photoshop for web graphics. The final step (disabling sRGB in Save For Web) is not to be missed.
Photoshop colour set up
Here is a demo movie showing how to export your image from Photoshop and then upload it to this site.
Design draft export & upload
Design draft export & upload (iphone version)
If you’d prefer the text version:
- Use “Save for Web & Devices” in Photoshop to export your image.
- Click on the link to the Gallery page (in the top menu).
- Use the form on the Gallery page to submit your image.
Here is the Photoshop comp in case you are curious:
Design Draft set up v2
Here are a couple of free web apps that can be very useful design tools.
What The Font is a free web service offered by MyFont. It allows you to identify a font from a photo or screenshot - much easier than trawling through typeface catalogues.
Here are some screenshots from the iPhone version of the service:
Start screen
Cropped image of font sample
Font suggestions
As you can see in the final pic, the app did a good job identifying the typeface.
The Multicolr search provides a way to find images on Flickr based on colour.
Multicolr image search
If you know of other useful web tools add a comment to this post and include a url.
As discussed in last week’s tutes, you may find it useful to employ some alternatives to Google in your search for good design references.
Delicious and Digg were a couple of services that were mentioned.
Delicious.com
Digg.com
It is a good idea to follow up the designers of the sites that you like. In most cases those designers will have links to other works and other designers that will also be worth checking out.
In general, look for ways to create meaningful networks of references rather than just randomly searching the web.
As mentioned in the week 1 lecture, to submit your blog link:
Your name will appear in the “Student Blogs” list in the sidebar.
Click a name to view their blog.
To view the online lectures you need to be logged in to the site.
If you’re not logged in you’ll get a “Page not found” error.