Courses/Design & Technique-Essential Web Design
Summary
Hello, welcome to my homepage. Hope you like it. If you do feel free to send me an email.
This or similar messages were present in many of the personal website on the mid-90's. Before the templates and uniform layouts of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the way to present yourself to the world, on the nascent medium of the Internet, was to construct your own website - a homepage - your home on the Web.
In this course we will revisit that past and learn how to publish content on Wold Wide Web, by design simple web-pages from scratch, using HTML and CSS. But since we live in 2015, we'll also explore the possibilities of current Wold Wide Web, where video, audio, maps, drawing canvas and typography open up the an exciting territory for artists or designers to work in.
As a conductive threat that will run along these sessions, we'll take a critical look at how identities have been invented, confused, or reaffirmed in online environments. To help us think and design, we'll take a close look at art-works and interventions for the Web, as well as, services like Google-Search or Facebook, in which identity plays a central role.
Method
Classes will take the form of an seminars where participants will explore examples, engage in discussion about issues of online identity, and for the most part learn the fundamentals of web-design. Each class will combine both expository and hands-on development of prototypes, where students will be asked to bring into practice the acquired knowledge in inventive and meaningful ways.
Classes
week 1 - The Internet and the Web
Courses/Design & Technique-Essential Web Design/01
- What do you I use the Internet for?
- Are the Internet and the Web the same? What is the difference between them?
- Distinction between the Internet (the infrastructure, like a highway) and the Web (one of the vehicles of the highway)
- (Brief) History of the Internet - a information highway build for the military
- (Brief) History of the Web - a wold-wide documentation system build for scientists
Films
Degoutin, Stéphane, and Gwenola Wagon. World Brain Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon, 2012. http://worldbrain.arte.tv.
Optional Reading
Stephenson, Neal. “Mother Earth Mother Board.” Wired, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html.
week 2 - HTML: a language for browsers humans
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- What is a Web page?
- What happens when I save a web-page? What files do I save?
- The Browser: the interpreter
- HTML
- tags: are ways of saying this = a image, that = a paragraph
- Essential HTML page structure
- Basic content tags: p, b, i, img ...
- hyper-links
- Prototype: scribbling a simple webpage
- Homework: save any website you want and change it into something else.
week 3 - CSS style or the clothes of HTML
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- CSS as a way to visually present the content
- CSS style-sheet
- Id and Classes identifiers
- CSS colors: RGB and hex triplets
- Inspector for CSS
- Homework: save any website, keep its content and structure as it is, but by simply styling its CSS, make it into something different.
week 4 - CSS for typography
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- CSS for web typography
- Web Fonts
- Default fonts
- Embedded Fonts
- Open Fonts Licenses
week 5 - Web to print
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week 6 - screen-page dialogues
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- Post-digital moment - analog and digital reading coexisting
- Examples of projects that embrace the 2 forms and establish a dialog between them
- How can the work developed for the web exist also in physical?
- How can the physical and analog publication make its way to the screen?
- Discussion of work in development
week 7 - uploading webpages to server
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List of deliverables
- Create a webpage that is a minimalist painting.
- Build a short story using links. At each link the user learns more,
or gets more confused, about the story. It can simply be a labyrinth.
- Find a text that you consider interesting; place it on a webpage;
Type-set it with CSS, so that the style either illustrates, contradicts or is in dialog with the content ( use at least one custom font )
- Transform the type-set text (from previous week) into a a ready to
print PDF and print it.
- (re)present a part of your fanzine to your web project;
Software Required
To send to Wilco:
XCode Git - http://git-scm.com/download/mac Github - https://mac.github.com/ Pandoc - http://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases Sublime text - http://www.sublimetext.com/ Firefox (latest version - 40) - http://www.getfirefox.com/ Chrome - https://www.google.com/chrome/ Filezilla https://filezilla-project.org/ Inkscape - http://inkscape.org/en/ Calibre - http://calibre-ebook.com/
