First Wedding Photo Shoot Ever

I did this shoot for a friend. The very first wedding I’ve ever done. I was a backup photographer that almost became the main photographer. I had a ton of fun! Since I was the backup photographer, I didn’t interrupt the main one and let everyone look at her. I was able to squeeze in and get a couple.

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CSS Trickery: Rounded Corners

So check this out. Super simple way to get rounded corners on just about any block-style element and images!

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I Love This Building

I go up to Salt Lake every now and again. Every time I go, I love seeing this building for more reasons than one. Even when I don’t have time to take pictures of it, just looking at it and finding new things in the architecture of it amazes me. What’s even more awesome is to think it was built over 100 years ago and it took 40 years to build, not to mention the time it took to design. The designers were sent to Europe and spent time studying the architecture there to help incorporate it into this building.

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You know what would be cool?

Some new features in DreamWeaver that would make styling even MORE streamline.

How it works now:

You create your HTML file and then your CSS file. You link the two together through the <link> tag in the header. Start coding your guts out, switching between the two to add classes and ID’s to the stylesheet as you go. Then, at the end, switch to CSS to style it. This may be a little bit different according to your workflow, but that’s how I get things done.

NOW imagine something like this. Go to File>New and create your HTML document. Easy Peasy. At the very start, link to your stylesheet. What’s that? You don’t have one created yet? Well, DreamWeaver can – and does – already tell you that. What if you want to take it to a new level? Have it automatically create the file for you in the directory you specified in the href of the link? Is this blowing your mind yet?

Hang on, cuz I’m not done yet…

They’ve already got the really cool feature – and I LOVE it – of having attached files be right there in the header section for you to click on. Super cool.

Let’s take the auto-creation to the next level.

So you’re coding away and you have your CSS file attached and everything. What if when you create  a new class or ID, it put it into the stylesheet for you? Or when you used a new HTML tag? So, for example, when I create a class="content", it goes into the stylesheet and writes:

.content {

}

Now there would be a couple of logistical issues with this. First of all, you may not want to style every single HTML tag that you use. Second, I know that with my stylesheets, I like to keep them minimal and grouped together so that it makes it easy to find information later. And lots of comments. Of course, we could take this to the next level and do the same thing for JavaScript, PHP and even more pages.

What are some other issues, though, that would have to be overcome to get this feature? And what are some solutions to those problems. All in all, it seems like a pretty simple upgrade…

Personas in a Nutshell

These are some class notes I took from my interaction design class focusing on personas. Thought it would be helpful for everyone out there.

PERSONAS

• Be sure to design your site with your clients in mind. Not only demographics, but psycographics as well. What are their buying habits? what are they looking for?
• Also be sure to design around their needs and goals. What are they looking to do? Does your website perform this task? How effective is it?

How are needs defined?

• By programmers? Users are going to need to be experts
• By marketers? Site will be focused on beginners, since they are the easiest people to please
• Should be based on intermediate users.
• Logic says that to satisfy a broad audience, you should make applications as broad in functionality as possible to please the most people. THIS LOGIC IS FLAWED!!
• Personas are PRECISE DESCRIPTIVE MODELS of users based on the goals, behaviors and motivations of real people and represent them throughout the design process.

Why Personas?

• determine what a product should do and how it should behave
• communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers
• build consensus and commitment to the design
• they resolve user-centered design issues (three in particular) 1. the elastic user (your user keeps changing, and so does your design) 2. Self referential design (you are NOT your target audience) and 3. design edge cases