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Published February 6, 2009 by Rebecca Matheson

Effective Communication and the Web

grantham_toast_in_the_sky_jSmashing 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.

What I love about Smashing articles is the wealth of information that comes with each post. They, (Un-surprisingly really) use the web as it was intended to be used – to network information. This is certainly something I could do better on this blog. However as it’s purpose waxes and wanes so must it’s content. After all, All Said & Done began as a personal blog and needs in many ways to remain the same.

On that note, my new blog theme is almost operational, although I’m still in the process of dreaming up all the extra fun things I can implement before I go live. That and I am also intending to write up a second theme for www.becmatheson.com to match – despite serving very different purposes, and I as yet haven’t decided if they should come independent of eachother… that and I’ve just read an article that’s gotten me thinking.

image source

Blogging Create Design Post of the Day Technology Web Design

Blogging theme design web design

Published September 22, 2008 by Rebecca Matheson

JBP Live

I forgot to mention that James Burke Photography is live.

I like it (I made it by the way) but it has let me realise that I still have a lot to learn about web design. Not sure if I’d do some things quite the same next time around.

It was an enjoying spare time filler … if only to have some of that now.

My most recent freelance ‘project’ is a resume unfortunately due to the confidential nature of resumes, it lives under wraps.

Create Design Photography Web Design

experience james burke photography web design

Published April 18, 2008 by Rebecca Matheson

The grapple

I have been feeling increasingly flat about this whole ‘study to be a designer’ thing today. I have a small inkling that it’s simply the homework blues but the homework blues can seep ever so slightly into, the crap-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into despair.

The other part of this inkling is that at the moment my idea of graphic design is too tightly tied with the fact that I can’t draw very well and it’s hard to find examples of designers that are the same and have this weird affinity with writing instead.

If you could find me an avenue where design and writing were intrinsictly linked, I would be a happy happy girl. Gosh I’m becoming reliant.

To brighten the room, let me share the web-based folio I made for my interactive web class. Although I ran out of time and never managed to work out how to get my fixed positioned site to sit centrally via CSS (How do you do that btw?), I’m relatively happy with it (except the slight off positioning of one of my links – damn, the things you realise later!). Curiously the site looks a billion times better on my lovely shiny new mac than it does on the PC I built it on – ahh screens.

Have a look.

I’ve been really impressed with the web tutors at Swinburne, although I’m mystified why they bothered teaching table based layout before they launched into CSS. The assignment could be created in either form. Why?!

My next self initiated task is to turn the static thing into a blog template to give myself the experience in creating templates from scratch.

This is the stuff I enjoy.

My question is, can I possibly get myself a job in the web-design/print-design/writing field with what I’m studying?

Yes you silly girl, you can, you just need to get over your loathing of package design and your mistrust of anal retentive development methods.

Create Design Life Uni

frustration web design

Published April 3, 2008 by Rebecca Matheson

In time…

A job somewhere like this would be the dream.

Meanwhile… I’ll go back to doing some not so exciting homework to get me closer.

I have decided lately that web-design might just be avenue of design to chase, unless of course I somehow can fluke myself into being paid to write my pretty little head out.

Oh yes, and tomorrow I am 22.

Blogging Design Words

Blogs Design web design writing

Published March 14, 2008 by Rebecca Matheson

Oh come now

reviewtollbooth.jpgSo 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.

Design Life Uni

communication design design and environmental sustainability package design swinburne university typography university web design

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