Don’t Forget your Audience

Posted on February 22, 2010
audience

I recently started a project for a jewelry artist. Basically a portfolio site with events, a bio, and a thumbnail gallery.

I knew the majority of her visitors wouldn't be very tech savvy, but I may have still over estimated their abilities. The site has a page with a thumbnail gallery of her work, you click a thumbnail and through jquery the photo enlarges to a full view. Unfortunantly the client came to me and said

Rounded Box with Gradient in CSS

Posted on February 20, 2010
Rounded Box

Rounded edges are naturally easier on the eye and give a calm flowing feel. They are in use on so many websites and can be assembled hundreds of ways. This is just one way to create this visual effect.

First things first, you'll need some kind of image editing

Working For Free

Posted on January 12, 2010

Just getting started in any career field can be very difficult. Employers are looking for individuals with experience, Clients want someone who has a firm grasp of the job, so on and so forth. Where does one start? This is the predicament I'm in right now. I'm finishing up my degree in interactive media and am ready to jump head first into designing websites, developing online content, and just getting going in this career field.

stearns mock-up

Posted on October 25, 2009
stearns1

This is my mock up for a non-profit farm that my web 2 class is doing a site redesign for. It's a local historic farm in Parma, oh. I decided to go with the rustic look, I also thought a simple navigation would be good for the site's audience. I built this mock up using Adobe Fireworks cs4 and PhotoShop cs4

Copyright and Contracts

Posted on September 27, 2009
funny pictures of cats with captions

I looked into copyright laws concerning web designers and artists in general and I think my head might explode from reading too much legalese. But it seems to me, the best thing an artist can do is retain ownership of their art even if it is created for someone else. When we as designers create a site or piece of art for a client, we should hold on to the copyright for said idea. This way if our idea becomes a billion dollar piece of branding that a company uses, we're entitled to a piece of the pie. Designing a site and elements for a site, web designers should keep ownership of almost everything such as php pages, javascript, pngs, etc. this