wavesoflife

On our Discussion Board for class, we have an introductory thread where we post about ourselves. So far, it appears that half the students in the class (at least) have no web design experience at all. They’ve said they’re rather intimidated by the assignments. I can understand that. The “suggested assignment times” have increased for this class. They were 3-4 hours usually per assignment and now they’re 6-8 hours. In Advanced Graphic Design, my assignment times were pretty close to the suggested times. But for Illustration…I’d spend sometimes 20 hours on one project. I’m not sure if that was because Illustrator was new to me or because I chose complicated pieces and tried to make them as good as possible. What I’m just trying to say is that the suggested assignment times aren’t always accurate.

Sometimes these classes seem really hard. Not to me, because I have a strong graphics program background, but for people with little experience in that. There are no prerequisites for this degree other than an Associates degree in any subject or equivalent credits. I’ve been lucky so far. I’ve had to learn three new programs for this. The first (and hardest) was Illustrator. For that class, Illustrator was the only thing I had to learn. My Photoshop background made this easier because I was familiar with the interface. For InDesign, that was also the only new program I had to learn and that was very simple to learn. But in that class, we also used Photoshop for the first time. So some students had to learn both Photoshop and InDesign that session. This time, I need to learn Dreamweaver. I’m already very familiar with Photoshop and the basic concepts of web design, so it’s basically just how to work Dreamweaver that I need to learn. For other students, they’re still just learning Photoshop, plus they’ll need to learn CSS.

On a side note, since I’ve learned Illustrator I often wish for some of the tools from that in Photoshop. Photoshop felt very foreign to me the first time I used it after using Illustrator several hours every day for 5 weeks.

Got my book and software for Web Design today. I got a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 and the book is Dreamweaver MX 2004 Hands-On-Training. Honestly, I don’t know who picks these books out for us. There are always much better ones they could have picked. They use the same site idea throughout (an eyeglasses store) and most of their designs are table-based.

I think we should have had two textbooks for this course. One on how to use Dreamweaver and another on actual web design. Because if you’re trying to learn design from that book, you’re screwed. Their designs look like ones from 1996. I do have an Advanced Web Design course coming up next January so hopefully that will actually cover design.

However, I’m pleased that we’re using Dreamweaver. I need to learn it and don’t want to use it for my own sites.

I’m having a really hard time making myself do this critique for my last assignment, even though we had to pick a design as a small group and my group picked the design I suggested.

I just feel like this is such a stupid project. I really don’t think it’s going to help me become a graphic designer at all. As I said before, we did pretty much this exact assignment before in another class.

I know I need to just get it done and over with but I can’t think of much to say about the design.