Doing all the wrong things. While I am supposed to be focusing on my academics right now, I spent the last few days in a design induced spree–CSS’ing everything in my path.
It all started with my multimedia class. I introduced XHTML and CSS this week–and I’m pretty happy with how everything went. Every student entered Thursday’s class with a validated XHTML document–and most left with a pretty good understanding of how style sheets work. I’m working on a detailed tutorial, hopefully I’ll publish somewhere external to my own site and Purdue. The tutorial is already 8 pages, and, yes, it took quite a bit of time to compose!
My students turned this plain resume into this CSS formatted resume. I really blew through modifying list-styles, but Tuesday is another day. Up next, we’re going to create a navigation section and turn a single page resume into a professional web presence…
Actually, that’s all a lie. It all started when I began redesiging my own website last week. I’m looking for something more inviting than what I have up there now (since I’m hitting the job market next year, I figure the dark and brooding intellectual isn’t as attractive as the bright and inviting designer. I’m also trying to collect all my projects into a portfolio section. Looking at them together, I’m quite happy with how far my design skills have come in the past four years (four years ago I thought computers were the work of the devil–I’ve moved on).
Moving on, I spent a full seven hours last night not writing my prospectus but rather redesigning a local association’s website. No pics of this one, either, yet–but I am particularly pleased! I didn’t really redesign the site, as much as reorganized material and perfectly recreated a complex, table and image based layout entirely in standards-compliant CSS. I did have to bend some semantic XHTML rules (creating two empty divisions for image borders), but I’ll get over it.
Not enough crazy web design coding fun? I just started the revision for the North American Levinas Association. The site will be particularly challenging becuase it has an incredible amount of content to convert and organize–a couple years worth of material, multiple navigation systems, etc. Oh, and did I mention that its all coded in frontpage and there is next to useless? Nothing like coding 100 link resource section from scratch… yum. I have a rough mock-up, but there’s still significant work to do. At this point, I’m more interested in getting the content XHTML’d, the fine design points (read:reward) will come later.
Screenshots, pics, links to all this stuff will come later. After I finish that prospectus (if I keep saying that, perhaps it will come true!)
