Design Thoughts

Well, the readings on design were refreshing because, unlike everything else we've read, I already knew alot of the information. Using Text Organizers was a good article that reminded me you don't always need to find photos or clip art to make things look nicer, you can just do cool things with text. The weird fake articles within the article were interesting as well. The Web Design from Scratch article was pretty basic as well. I thought it made a good point that when you're designing, you need a better goal than "I want my webpage to look neat" because you never really know when you're done with it then. The rest of the article seemed like things we have already talked about when covering other topics like accesibility and interface-they stress that you have to design a web page in a way that will be most beneficial to the way actual people use the web. Nielsen's article was also pretty basic stuff about the differences between print design and web design. It talks about dimensionality, nativagation, response time, resolution, and canvas size and how print designs have the upper hand in this area but I agree with the article that even though that's true, the web is still more popular because it's more interactive. I found this article a bit depressing though, especially while reading that all the benefits of getting an actual newspaper will be gone in about 10 years when pages download faster than you can turn a page to a newspaper (I think that's already happened), screen resolution sharpens, and we have huge screens the size of a newspaper spread (which seems a little too large to really be practical-especially with the growing popularity of laptops). As a journalism major, it's sad to see declines in the amount of actual papers printed-I know you have to change with the times and online newspapers are very popular and cheaper, but there's just something about an actual newspaper that I love. And as a future journalist, I would feel much "cooler" if I saw an article I wrote in actual print instead of online. Everyone can write online these days-it takes the specialness out of it. Anyway, I'm rambling-but I think the article did a good job of pointing out that designing a web page is completely different than designing a newspaper and if you don't use the right design, your publication isn't going to be very effective. The Web Style Guide had alot to say on design but it was all pretty much review. I also noticed how in it, design was tied to pretty much every other topic we have covered in our class. As far as the WIU Library search thingy, I'm not sure what the design problems are. I think it's weird that you can check a category and then it atomatically checks things in the individual resources section. It's also annoying that you can't just type in a keyword at the top and then it automatically searches everything, you have to pick out specific databases. I know I personally don't care what database I get it from, I just want the information. Anyway, maybe we'll talk about that more in class today so I may have more comments later.