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I materialized in what I thought was my final stop on this strange journey in space and time. By the power of the editor's pen, I'd been hurled six years into the future. Room 208 in the tech building. Four students of web development and design sat in front of me. They were perfectly ordinary . . . no capes, heroic poses or red pens.
LR: You're . . . the Purple Team? Are you some kind of fan club or something?
Victoria Rahall: No, we're students here. Our professor assigned us the name when we were assigned our team project . . .
Jeff Sperry: . . . to create a web site detailing the processes involved in web design. We made a site dealing with how we found a host, the benefits of cascading style sheets and some information about us.
Racheal Gelb: The two other teams were the blue and green teams.
For our readers:
The Blue Team's Home Page.
The Green Team's Home Page.
Chris Demmons: We had individual assignments too, and those are linked from this web site.
LR: So what did each of you do on the project?
VR: I started out as the project manager, and contacted each member of the group to make sure they understood their job roles. At first I was a little hesitant about being project manager because this is only my second web design class and I knew the rest of my group was very experienced in web design.
Also, as project manager I was in charge of the scripting, which I really needed the practice since it's new and challenging to me.
My job for this assignment is layout artist. I am in charge of layout and proofing. After my two classes, I see that there is a lot to learn about web design and that there is a lot more to learn in the future but to really become proficient I need to have more hands on experience rather than reading it from a book.
JS: My original assignment was layout artist, I really enjoyed working with the rest of the team in creating the site. I'm a very visual person, so I would create several mock ups of the site and show them to the rest of the team. Then I would use their feedback to create a final design for the site.
I am currently serving as coordinator, and learning a lot about CSS and xhtml. I'm very eager to start applying what I've learned here to my own projects outside of class.
RG: I started out as the Editor, and made sure that the content on the page was up-to-date. I then switched roles and was the graphic designer. I must say that graphic design is not my area of expertise, but with the help of my teammates we were able to collaborate and get through this together. I also thought that Chris's idea on having a "super hero theme" was brilliant.
CD: I started out as the graphic designer. I'm not very good at that, I'm afraid. I did the design the top graphic that you see on each page, and looked up how to alter the photos to make them have a comic book like look on each page.
For our readers:
MacMerc.com provides a
step-by-step tutorial on how to create a comic book-like effect from an ordinary digital
photo. The application of this technique can be seen in the heading of each page on this
web site.
What I really enjoyed was being editor. I was responsible for creating content for these pages. I wanted to do a superhero theme and my team agreed that it might be a fun idea.
Also, I wanted to highlight the role that content plays in page creation. Your page can have masterful graphic work, a terrific layout, sensible navigation and clean code. It all falls down if the content, even if it is important, is boring.
Xhtml, CSS, and good design practices are important, but they do lack a certain "wow" factor. My goal in using this theme was to keep the content interesting enough to keep your attention. I hope I've succeeded.
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