March 2 response
I enjoyed the readable layout of Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design, and appreciate that he aptly practices his own design principles in the book. He noted at the beginning who is his intended audience and made his book readable with just the right amount of graphics and words. Although the information regarding the larger project ideas and persona schemes may not be totally applicable to this class, he offers some excellent presentation meeting tips that I can see myself referring to when I have to present project ideas at my work. In fact, when I’ve presented my research at different history conferences or lectures/discussions as a Teaching Assistant at GW, I realized that I asked myself these questions about who my audience was and how it would be best to communicate complicated historical issues. It’s both challenging and exciting to translate these questions to this visual context in the form of web site design, and Brown’s perspective helps me thinks about history from this non-traditional angle. Also, prior to reading Brown’s section on competitive analyses (as well as Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience), I hadn’t thought about my site from a business-oriented standpoint and am now trying to do more research on what sites about my topic are already out there and how I can design my site in a way that attracts users to visit and take advantage of the resources I hope to make available.
“For the purpose, the best place to start is the motivation” (120), notes Brown, and I keep trying to solidify my answer to the question of motivation for this project in my strategy and scope. After working on my strategy and scope, I see that I am leaning toward keeping it more general that I thought I would. My doing so is probably due to the fact that I am still very unsure of how the site will look from a visual standpoint. I have been playing around with the different themes on WordPress and like the “ocular professor” one for now. Brown writes, “Figure out how you want to use color and start experimenting with it” (8), so I am going to make more of an effort to think about what color schemes are “appropriate” for the content of my project. I have been trying to use the built-in FTP program via Dreamhost to manipulate my site, but realize I am still unsure of the very basics of HTML and CSS. I am going to take some time to re-visit the CSS book we were assigned to a couple of weeks ago because the exercises may prove to be more useful to me now that I have a site with which I can work.
Because I have so many ideas floating around in my mind regarding this project, Brown’s section on site maps and wire frames reminded me that I can and must use such drawings as a brainstorming mechanism in order to understand which sites will link to which elements as opposed to writing about them in prose. The article, “The what, when and why of wireframes” by Kelway, also clarified a lot of basic points about wireframes for me, especially the diagram of the abstract to concrete/strategy to surface concept for web sites that Garret also hashes out in his work.
