These last few weeks have been pretty fun. I actually felt like I went into a sort of flow state with coding my Lemmings page and my Portal page: I knew enough HTML and CSS to make things look the way I wanted, and I wasn’t being interrupted by having to troubleshoot or google any significant issues.
Like, just yesterday I was actually excited to get back to my web page because I had a new idea for how to get the styling to work the way I envisioned. I already forgot what specifically it was that I was trying to do, but I haven’t felt that way about an assignment in awhile.
One thing that has helped me this week is taking a bit of the design work off my shoulders by drawing heavy inspiration from other website designs, like Wikipedia. I figure that’s okay to do at this point because I’m polishing my coding skills, so picking a website to emulate lets me study that site, poke around in its code, see how it works, and apply it to my own work. I can code, and I can design, but doing both at the same time takes a lot of mental energy. It’s harder to iterate through ideas when coding than it is in Adobe Illustrator, for example, where I can just drag text around and resize it easily. This is especially, especially true for fonts. Instead of having hundreds of fonts at my disposal, including variable fonts that I can drag sliders to manipulate easily, I have to load each individual font and each weight (and for variable fonts, each axis? I honestly don’t totally understand it yet). That really slowed me down. But it’s nothing I can’t learn in time.
One last significant thing for these past few weeks was the article on taking back the web. It made me want to learn a lot more about the web design industry, and basically left me with a lot of questions about where I might fit in, and what I still need to learn.