Assignment Description

One of the fascinating things about designing with CSS, XHTML, and WordPress is how readily designers place their new design ideas online—usually in their blogs—asking readers to try them out on their own sites. Readers can adjust the design in subtle or drastic ways and then respond to the designer informing the public of how they incorporated the design on their own sites. Its a great way for new design ideas to move quickly through the web design community. For our web design bookmarking list, we’ll be entering into this community, posting the design ideas we find to the course IWS Fall 2010 Social Bookmarking group at Diigo. I have created a diigo bookmarking tutorial (.pdf) for setting up and using Diigo.

Each entry you make should contain at least the following information:

• a summary of the idea, technique, design features, and so on
• the designer/creator of the idea
• who might have sent you to the site where you found the technique
• whether or not you plan on incorporating the technique into your site (not everything you bookmark need to go into your site)
• 5 – 7 meaningful tags

Please bookmark (at least) 2 entries per week to the course group between September 28 and December 14. If we all fulfill this assignment, we’ll have at least 100 design techniques at our disposal, making it a unique and incredible resource (one that can add to the knowledge of future students and web designers).

The entries can cover any kind of web design topic, from the most basic to the most advanced. Whatever you think can be helpful for someone in the class is worthy of being posted. Here are two examples, on a basic technique and one more advanced:

Inknoise’s Layout-o-matic creates CSS layouts that are flexible and work in all browsers. Its simple to use and a great way to start a new design.

Found at: Zeldman

Yes, I’ll be using the tool to create my next design.

and

“Faux Columns” by Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits discusses “[a] simple way to make CSS columns appear equal in length, regardless of the content that they contain.” This technique requires a good amount of skill in positioning elements on a page and understanding the nuances of the background image.

I’d like to try it, but don’t anticipate using it any time in the near future, but because we’re using WordPress I’m not sure I’ll be needing to any time soon.

Here is what it will look like as you bookmark the page using Diigo:

Here is how it will look on the Diigo group page:

So, the question now is: Where do we start? There are several prominent designers and design sites listed under the “all about web design” heading in right sidebar on every page of this site. I suggest starting with them, read what they have (especially in their archives), and then just follow the links that seem interesting to you. You can also go to W3C schools to see some quick how-to’s that I find very useful.