This project was definitely a stretching and growing experience. I went into this thinking I had a good grasp of photoshop, but quickly saw that using photoshop for web design was entirely different than using it to edit photos. I spent the first few days extremely disorganized and frustrated using layers; getting everything organized into folders was a huge step for me that was very helpful (and tediously annoying). I feel like I’m still stuck knowing only the basics of photoshop; walking around to my classmates comps felt like I was looking at “real” sites, while mine still felt very elementary.
I never realized how many small details of websites there are and I honestly am not sure I included everything I was supposed to. I would like to figure out a better way to extract items from actual sites besides taking a screen shot so the resolution is actually decent. Adding the small rss, facebook, and twitter icons were difficult. Another downfall of mine is sketching. While I took the time to sketch out big ideas for the site, I spent a lot of time creating different “alternatives” within my actual compositions… I feel like I should do that ahead of time. Next time, eh? Something I am unfamiliar with is type treatment on a website. I still am not sure what fonts are “best” to use (I know there’s a list of web-safe fonts, but I also know designers are font-snobs) and what sizes are appropriate. I struggled with making the sidebar text readable but still space efficient. Random: I also struggled with changing the color of the text a few times- it kept graying it out. Why was that?
This is entirely not a cop-out, but the snow days came when my motivation was at its highest causing it to flag immensely. I lost momentum and struggled to get back in the “this project is FUN!” mindset. The longer we were out of class, the less I felt like working on this project. I feel like the next project will go better now that I can jump right in rather than spend a few days wandering around lost and confused.
Things I Want to Know More About:
-“Convert to Smart Object” and “rasterize layer”…. when is this used?
-Gradients/textures
-Appropriate website type treatment rules
-Best way to capture web elements w/o using screenshot
-Using cs5
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