I can’t believe the semester is already halfway over. It feels like the time flew by, but also, I think the course has been paced really well. I haven’t been expected to understand things without having been given adequate time to learn.
Responsive Design is quite a cool concept, and really advanced when you compare it to other types of layout design, such as print. Making your layout look good at every possible screen size feels like an insane task to me, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like if we had some kind of standard for screen sizes across all manufacturers. Like, we could have one phone screen size, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop, and then a super big desktop. My brain doesn’t like the idea of site layouts changing pixel by pixel, at least not yet. It takes effort to figure out and somewhat limits how experimental my designs can be at my beginner level of knowledge, compared to something like poster design. This is like a new dimension I have to learn to think in. I will say, the idea of layouts transforming at breakpoints and having a gradual sequence from mobile to ultrawide desktop is pretty awesome if done well. I feel like it’s probably not even appreciated that often, since most people will just use the site on one or two screens and not experiment with slowly resizing the windows. One question on my mind right now is: how does responsive design interact with the columns and grids that you can set up in Figma?
It took me a long, long time to finally get my Midterm site design to be something that resembles the way it looked in my head when I first saw the line “conference for evil dictators” in the Microsite topics PDF. And as I’m writing this I still haven’t finished the tablet and mobile versions, hopefully those will be done tomorrow. It was cool to see the design come together aesthetically towards the end. I think next time I’m going to devote more time to research when I try some ambitious aesthetic concept (like “Evil Y2K”). And, as I always say to myself when having difficulty with site layout, this time I’m really going to pay attention to the layouts of all the websites I visit, all the time, so I can absorb them all and have the best mental database of site layouts ever. Ideally. If I can remember.