[UPHPU] Does anybody know where I can get some better web design skills?

[Velda]

My goodness. I'll have to remember to not try to write advice while 
doing 5 other things at once.  Hope this made enough sense to be worth 
anything.

-V



Velda wrote:
> Personally?  I figure out what font sizes I need and how wide the 
> paragraphs should be to be readable, etc.  Then I do a screen capture 
> and bring it to photoshop, where I more or less play tetris with it 
> till its in an arrangement that fits the project and flows well. Think 
> ahead especially at how the user is going to have to get at things on 
> your site to be sure it's intuitive and makes lots of sense.  Then, 
> when you've got things arranged, squint at it a bit to be sure 
> everything still makes sense.
>
> Then I work with a gray-scale pallet to figure out what should go in 
> lighter tones and what can go darker.  The point is that the page has 
> to flow well and look good in grayscale as it does in color.  I was 
> pretty pleased with myself when Cameron Moll suggested the grey scale 
> thing recently when talking about great design.  :-)  He added one 
> more test to this - try applying a blur to the entire thing and see if 
> the most important info is still obvious.  (It's what I try to 
> accomplish with squinting)
>
> Once you've reached that point, you've got a fairly good design going 
> for you.  Bring on the color. If I've got any focal image I pick from 
> that.
>
> HTH,
>
> Velda
>
>
>
>
> Nathan Lane wrote:
>> I think that I have down some good techniques for programming backend,
>> content management, and I can handle flat-file and DBMS databases. I 
>> also am
>> very good at AJAX, CSS styling, and XHTML strict writing. BUT I lack in
>> skills needed to design the layout and interface, not that I can't 
>> program
>> almost anything anyone gives me, but I want to be able to give myself
>> something. At this point, I have my own very minimal website -- and I 
>> don't
>> keep it up to date, because all of my data is hard coded in XML files
>> (basically I have developed an online method for adding content yet).
>> Anyway, sometimes I'll go over to DeviantArt.com and look at people's 
>> web
>> layouts to get an idea, but where does everybody get their own ideas? I
>> would appreciate any direction, especially for my personal web site 
>> -- my
>> goal is to sell myself as a web programmer, software QA engineer, and
>> application programmer.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>   
>
>
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