Lou Fuiano
WDS Fall 2006
Duff

CSS Loves Me, and I Love it Right Back

This was a full experience for me. I felt we all benefitted from the structure and the research. I personally feel much more confident as a result. Design wise, I was concerned that I wasn't challenging myself. I felt I was staying close to tried and true devices like clean, type driven layouts and a tight grid. Once I was into the navigation and interactive stuff however, I realized that I had bigger fish to fry.

While I didn't get to everything I wanted to, I especially liked the intense rigor built into the process. It's no wonder why some of the best web development is done by a team. Even though we put these together as individual projects, the class dynamic was imperative. Sure, some of the comments can seem picky and even aligned with personal tastes, but the conversation surrounding the comments is what makes everyone better. I gained a boat load of insight.

Also, I didn't get to CSS positioning until the week before the deadline. Sad to say, Ajax never even saw the light of day for this project. That said, I'm all for the way CSS works. It made me feel loved. I would like to know more about it. While I'm at it, Head Start was an excellent resource. I much prefer that to Elizabeth Castro because it was so friendly and repetitive. Because of this, I was able to read it through and then find my way with the specifics using the online resources. CSS allowed me to see design possibilities that were not as manageable with just tables. Hence, it made for a better web design vocabulary.

If I had it to do over, I'd build more into the front end of my process as well as try to coincide it with the technical developmentŠ Ya know, spending more time with schematics and less time designing on the fly. What can I say, old habits die hard. Truth is, designing for the screen is a very broad language. One that that can't be covered in one project or one semester. Since I have always tended to get hung up on how things look, I didnšt adequately consider the possibilities of design based on how things work. How to design for search, reference, profile, navigate,etc. How you can turn a common experience into something profoundly different and evolving. That's where the rubber hits the road. That's where the real design is - Especially in this form.

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