The VIDweb Blog

(copy from mailing list) (from Elliot @ UCB Extension) :: please respond if you get this!

2005-03-02T10:03:00.000-08:00


I'm trying to figure out what the problem is with this mailing list.
Plesae respond to this list so I can see that it's working.

I updated the class site with an Creative Brief template.  Please ask
if you have any questions.

I'm also putting together lists of resources for relatively
inexpensive yet trustworthy hosting companies; reference sites for
PHP, mySQL, DHTMLand Flash; and various links to nicely designed
sites.  Please mail me if you have any suggestions to add to the list.

Thanks,
-e

(copy from mailing list) suggested process for IA assignment

2005-03-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

I didn't have time to really get into my process for working on IA for
your site & kind of sprung the Garrett IA Visual Vocabulary on your
without discussion of the proper time for using it.

This is my usual process for dividing the information that you want to
present into logical "chunks" of information. The Web Style Guide
discusses chunking at http://www.webstyleguide.com/site/chunk.html
This "chunking" process is to divide info into chunks of five to nine
items. We chunk the information so it's easily understandable by the
human mind.
I'm assuming that your target user is human. ;)

First, I go through a stage that I like to call the BRAINSTORM. When
you're alone this can be done on a big piece of paper. Write down
every idea that you want to express to your user - information, visual
ideas, categories of info, feelings, colors. (Remember, we proposed
target users last week.)

Then you FILTER the products of the brainstorm into groups into
categories. The most important category for now is INFORMATION.
Don't worry about categorizing anything any more than INFORMATION and
NON-INFORMATION. For our purposes, NOT-INFORMATION is stuff like
graphic design, UI interactions, etc.

Next, ORGANIZE your items into groups of information five to nine
items deep. If your groups are much smaller you might want to
combine several of them. If they're much larger you might want to
break them out into multiple categories.

After you've organized your ideas you can start using the Garrett IA
to think about ways that a user can navigate through your data and
solve problems that they're interested in solving.

Is this pretty clear to everyone?
Please discuss.
-e

(copy of mail from the list) UCB Extension - Visual and Interactive Design for the Web Mailing

2005-03-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

Here's another try at the Visual and Interactive Design for the Web
mailing list.

On Monday night the white-board got erased before I could copy down
everybody's 2 websites. Please send me your homework from last week
- an analysis of your 2 sites, a high-level idea for the site that
you're going to work on over the course of the class.

We can also use this mailing list to share cool sites that you run
into and discuss assignments. I'll keep the list up for a while after
class so hopefully we can bounce ideas off of each other & share
resources that we've discovered.

Here are a few of the many links that I promised you. The rest are
coming soon.

The Class's blog -
http://thevidweb.blogspot.com/
I'm adding accounts for each of you to add what you see fit to the blog.
You can also create your own separate blog at this site. We'll talk a
bit about customizing the look and feel of the site when we talk about
Style in two weeks.

Jesse James Garrett's visual vocabulary -
http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/
At the bottom of the page there are sets of 'shape libraries' that you
can use with several drawing applications - from Adobe's InDesign and
Illustrator to Macromedia's FreeHand to OmniGraffle to OpenOffice, a
free open-source productivity suite that runs on Linux, Mac and
Windows machines.

I look forward to seeing your typed-up assignments from last week.
Thanks,
-e

Visual and Interactive Design for the Web Blog

2005-02-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the blog set up for Visual and Interactive design for the Web!

You can set up your own blog (for free) or you can add posts to this blog at blogger.com.

Send email to Elliot for login information.