AAD 086 FA23 – Page 3 – Learning Journal

AAD86 – Weeks 5 & 6

Now these past two weeks have definitely been interesting! There was a lot of content I didn’t know previously so it definitely felt like a curveball was thrown in my direction, just not necessarily in a bad way if that makes sense.

Stretching to Flex

Flexbox. Just the word brings so much freedom in simple web designs. It allows for placements that I just couldn’t reach without having it in my toolbox.

Mastering the Art of UI Design

User Interface (UI) design is the creative process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and visual appeal of a digital product. In today’s tech-driven world, UI design plays a pivotal role in shaping our digital experiences, whether we’re navigating a website, using a mobile app, or interacting with software.

Lisa’s Learning Journal: Week 6

Let’s talk about Flex!

Oh boy. We finally made it to flexbox. For some reason, I never cared for the flexbox layout during AAD85. I thought, “Heck, I can do this whole HTML and CSS thing without it”. I don’t know why I hated flexbox so much. Though, it is most likely because learning flexbox involves change, and change is scary.

Position is a matter of Perspective

To truly design you often have release control to let things flex and float.

Let it go!

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Week 6 of Intermediate Web Design, we focused on positioning elements within a webpage. Often taking elements out of the flow of the document and placing them where we determined they should go. Whether we were floating images to wrap text around them or flexing the elements to put them in a different orientation, we often had to release the control of the parent to move the child.

This week, I found a parallel to my professional and personal life. I have been trying to control the path of my career. I have been trying to make logical steps to move myself along MY imagined path. I came to a point this last week that I literally had to release this control and allow the next steps to fall as they are designed to, I had that moment of realization that I am not The Designer of all the twists and turns of my path, but it will go the way it should go. Sometimes the design is revealed by letting go and letting things fall into position.

Grids, Floats, and Flexbox

Over the last couple weeks, we were introduced to the float model and refreshed ourselves on the flexbox model. We also began our introduction to grid layouts.

Flexbox, and Grids, and Floats, oh my!

These last couple weeks we began to (re)tackle the concepts of Floats, Flexbox, and Grids. When do you use a Flexbox vs Grid? Or simply just Float?

What I learned about CSS?

First month of the course has been so exciting and productive on this web development journey. Practicing more semantic HTML has been an eye-opener. Understanding the importance of structuring content in a meaningful way not only makes the code cleaner but also improves accessibility for all users. It’s incredible how a few well-placed tags can make such a big difference.

wk4 – Learning Journal- Austin Hayes

Over the last two weeks I have had a lot of fun and have blown off the dust from my HTML and CSS skills.

Wk 3-4: We’re So Back

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.

Lisa’s Learning Journal: Week 4

This is just the beginning.

I’m not sure why, but it’s wild to think that we are already creating functioning websites. I think back to AAD85 quite often and think about how long it took to understand HTML and CSS and what they do. By this time in that class, I believe we were still trying to recognize the differences between IDs and classes. It was definitely a struggle, but I think it’s almost funny now.

AAD-0086 wk4 – Learning Journal

This is a summary of our topics of concentration for weeks three and four in Intermediate Web Design.

It’s all coming back!

The last couple weeks have been great practice and review on HTML, CSS, using FTP transfer, and linking other sites. We also reviewed some typography principles and articles.

4 Week Growth Spurt

When what you thought you remembered finally comes back into the light.

Well, the semester is in full swing now, and glimmers of what I learned more than 6 months ago and notes that I thought were so clear then are now coming into blurry focus. I am always so eager it get into the meat of a course and learn stuff, and I feel that we have been doing that. Building simple sites, writing code and doing the research to know the when-where-why’s of it all help me to get a sense of where I have been and where we are going.

Web Design AAD86 – Weeks 3 & 4

These last two weeks have been fun as we’ve started out re-introduction to CSS, which is what allows us to style and design our HTML pages.

Weeks 3 & 4 With Professor Mead

Oh man, what a good few weeks it has been in the development of the classes education. We went over and discussed the basic understandings of CSS in order to be able to properly troubleshoot our code later down the line. The biggest three things discussed are Specificity, Cascading, and Inheritance. Alongside our basic understanding of CSS we also learn how to apply a CSS reset or CSS normalize in order to have diversity and consistency within multiple types of web browsers! It’s a super useful tool if you want you’re creations to be properly displayed no matter what browser the end user has. We also cover typography, and really a lot of great articles involving typography! One of the topics of typography that stood out to me the most is kerning which is the space between letters. During my time as an intro to web design student I have noticed that fonts will “mush” some letter combinations together and I can’t stand it. Discovering kerning has allowed me to be able to look more in depth and hopefully I can apply it to my future work. Regardless of what we’ve covered in the past two weeks we definitely know that professor Mead is a great person who loves Llama’s and Lemmings.

All the knowledge

All the knowledge I’ve gained in the past two weeks has been underwhelming yet humbling.

These past two weeks have reminded me of the gaps in my knowledge of web design and semantics. Most of the content in this class so far has been reviews of content I learned last semester in the AAD85 class. Even though I took this course only 4 months ago, it is amazing how much your brain tosses out when you’re not actively putting your skills to use. So more than anything, this class has humbled me and reminded me how important it is to continuously practice your skills in order to maintain the knowledge in these areas. Granted, there are much less learning curves when re-learning a topic, but still disappointing nonetheless. So even if you’re not using your semantics knowledge for a practical instance, refresh your skills and keep using them.

USE THEM OR LOSE THEM!

Continuing on with HTML and CSS

Now that we’re into the semester a little ways, the things that I find myself needing to review are getting more and more complex. Flexbox? Responsive design? Stylesheets even. The list goes on.

What I Learned Weeks 3,4 AAD 86

Over the past two weeks we have been practicing a lot in HTML and CSS. I have remembered some information about the principles of typography. We practiced in our projects how to properly design a font in HTML.

Patience…

When you know enough to wish you could do more but you don’t know how to get it done. I’d say that has been my week with the portal page.

That is a frustrating feeling in anything we are learning. I need a flexbox, but I can’t remember how to create one so I watch YouTube videos and read articles. It’s the never ending learning cycle that sometimes I am patient with myself and sometimes I’m frustrated thinking I should know how to do this.

I also want to create a responsive design, wait, not true…I just want it to be a responsive site…you know, automatically. Shouldn’t dreamweaver know that we need a responsive site? But no, I need to go search that up too.

On a good note, the minute I wanted my <ol> aligned side by side, I knew I needed flexbox and the minute I wanted my site to work on mobile I knew I needed it to be responsive. So that’s the start I am at.