E-Portfolio

For a class I’m taking, I’m required to post a blog on my website telling how I made my personal portfolio website. To put it simply, I coded it by hand. All of my site has been made using straight CSS and HTML code, all put together using Notepad++. I find coding things to be very reliable and a great practice to use. I have made sites using DreamWeaver before, but for this particular site, I chose code. I hope that answers the question of “How I Made My Site”. Here’s the address of my website http://bmmcqueen.tripod.com

Scanning & Resolution

A scanner can be a Desktop Publisher’s great friend or confusing foe. Scanning and resolution can be a pain to someone who doesn’t know much about the topic.

When I use the scanner, I like to make sure, first of all, that the glass is clean. I hate getting smudges and dust all over my scan, but sadly some are unavoidable and need to be fixed in Photoshop. Make sure your picture is straight, because fixing that in Photoshop can be a pain as well. After scanning, I always like to have a hard copy of every picture, free from any kind of editing I’ve done, so I make a copy of everything and stick it in a folder to store away, just in case I make a bad edit or delete something.

Color Theory

Color is a great thing. Obviously. Without it we’d all be bland. And ever since my years in grade school, I’ve been learning about the color wheel. The color wheel is a circle (again obviously) of colors that rotate around each other with their compliment across from each other. Some common color palettes are monochromatic (all variations of the same hue), complimentary (compliments of each other), warm (red, orange, yellow), cool (blue, green, purple), Primary (red, yellow, blue), Secondary (green, orange, purple), etc, etc…

Kuler

In my experience, Kuler from Adobe has been a great resource for finding and creating color schemes. Using it, I’ve made a few color schemes easily and quickly. All you have to do is sign up, click custom and then the rest is up to you! After you’ve finished making your schemes you can save it and export it to use in just about any Adobe program, making it easy to organize and make your color schemes.

History of Typography

Back in the olden days, people used magical machines called printing presses where instead of using computers, they had to make iron casts of each letter and arrange them on the press to print a set of pre-defined letters making these really cool things called words which make sentences. The final result of this was a fancy shmancy piece of paper with the words written on them so that people didn’t have to risk getting old time carpal tunnel like the monks whose jobs were to write copies upon copies of books to be distributed to the lucky and rich people of the time. Lucky for us, we live in an age that makes printing text a simple task of clicking a print icon.

Font Resources

There are alot of fonts out there in the world, just waiting for us to find them and use them in our work. The only problem is finding the fonts that fit with our work, on the internet, there are thousands of places that may or may not have what you’re looking for. But fear not comrade! I have compiled a list of some font sites that are great resources for any designer. Enjoy!

Free Fonts

A great site that has over 1000, count ‘em, 1000 free fonts for both mac and pc
http://www.1001freefonts.com/

If Fonts Were People

So we watched the youtube video “If Fonts Were People” after class was over, and I’ll admit, I actually laughed out loud. It was hilarious to see fonts with personalities because honestly, when I see the font name, I already somewhat associated them with people, or at least personalities. I loved that Wingdings was the crazy one, because honestly, who can read that gibberish anyway *rimshot*. 

Principles of Design

All art requires composition, or so I’ve heard. I’ll admit I’m not the best at composing my website layouts, but now, you too can start to understand how to design the layout of your website to follow the basic design principles so that your site will look more composed and whole for the low low low price of reading the selected readings at the end of this blog! (reading the actual blog is greatly appreciated as well)

In summary, these articles describe the principles of design (already established in the previous paragraph) but these principles reach far beyond the artwork we all know and may love. These principles are great tools to use in graphic and web design. I don’t know about everyone else, but I like a well balanced page. I like symmetry along the y-axis and balanced background image. Others may differ from my oppinion, but the Gesalt Principles of art state that proximity, uniform connectedness and a good continuation is the recipe for a good website structure.

Illustrator Help

In time, I have discovered the amazing graphic designing software that is Adobe Illustrator. Since this great discovery, I have looked up and found a variety or resources that could be useful to the Illustrator junkie.

Here is the link for an Illustrator tutorial that shows how to make 3-D text, it’ll probably come in handy eventually if you plan to make logos, text based graphics, etc….. http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/3D-LOGO-Illustrator-tutorial/53482/

Here’s a great tutorial for a “glassy orb” that has been great in my experience for creating buttons….. http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Glassy-Orbs/10419

Copyright

Copyright is very important to an artist since everything they create is their interpretation of an idea. There is a very distinct difference between being inspired by another person’s work and stealing another’s work.

As a designer, it is hard to differentiate between what is inspiration and what is copying. You must make sure that what you are creating is something that you thought up that reflects your artistic design, not a copy of another artist’s work.