So much as to state that I have been busy and have only just hit my Google Reader after an absence of days and days. This is what uni has is stock for me. Because like it or not (and sometimes it is not), I do actually like the thing. I like my friends, on the whole I like my tutors and lecturers, I like the quirky people there that make me laugh, I like running into people I haven’t seen since first semester of the first year and still being able to say hello, I like that it’s forcing me to do things I don’t always want to do and showing me things that intrigue me, making me having good ideas when there are none and generally filling my head with all kinds of absurdities.
In a few weeks time I have to submit an essay on how designers are moving towards designing for environmental sustainability. This is not exciting in that the three set texts (one of which I must use), are all on very long wait lists at our somewhat pathetic uni-library. The topic itself, however is, and the websites I am finding in my punitive research is even more exciting. Truly.
After hours and days and weeks of stress related to lack of ideas and poor communication on behalf of our fine tutor, I have finally come up with a package design idea that is satisfying the requirements and is profound enough (or something) to be acceptable. Now I have to research and research and research and pull off some clever theoretical engineering. Clues to what I’m getting up to might run along the lines of me needing to visit the Colgate website.
Web is presented by two slightly hilarious and highly decent communicators, I have to haul together some kind of plan in the form of a workbook to show what kind of website I’m making for myself, then make it. This should be relatively easy and fun. Gosh it helps to know CSS. It freaked me out the other day when they started taking us through table based layout. OLD SCHOOL. EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO UNLEARN. Turns out next week we’re doing the ‘real deal’.
The amusing thing about table based layout is that in my early web-design experiments when I was about 12, I actually worked out the theory of it myself. I seriously wondered why the world wasn’t setting things up with ‘invisible’ tables and thought I was the only one out there doing so… later I worked out they already were. I was an intuitive genius.
Typography for Publication (see earlier layout duplication) turns out that we get an extra week for something I thought was due earlier. After, we launch into a fairly free form: design a 6 page/3-double spread publication with words and images of our own choice. Words taken from an article, images supplied by self, not by stock. Total freedom in assignments is good but also too lenient to allow for perpetual comfort.
image from the book The Phantom Tollbooth, which you should read because it’s fun. I haven’t read it in years.
Smashing Magazine – of which I am quite a fan, has recently written a ripper post on: Clear and Effective Communication in Web Design. It was interesting enough that I let my toast go cold. So if the web is your arena or your playground, then do yourself a favour and get over there.