CIOS 256 - Lesson 7

Typography – one of my favorite subjects! No, really, I can go on for hours about fonts. People often smile when I say that, but then when I actually get started, they get nervous.

Anyway, to take up the challenge of the group blog (even though the group blog is apparently no more), I present good and bad typography sites.

The good: Superfresh / Finch
Unusual font for a header. I like the color blocks for the dates, which help to visually set each entry apart. And excellent white space (or gray space, as the case may be).

The bad: Mark Boulton
For a blog that is supposed to focus on design and other web matters, I find his typography difficult to read. Part of the problem is that the page is just too full of text. Technically it’s a 3-column layout, but it’s very jumbled. The fonts are small and there is not much size, weight or color distinction between them.

For online typography resources, you don’t need to look much further than ilovetypography.com which will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about fonts.

If you’re in the market for some new fonts, try dafont.com or urbanfonts.com. Veer.com has excellent fonts as well, but you’ll have to pay for those.

I think the lessons are getting a little better. It’s more due to the design of the course, as we are now creating our own pages rather than just completing the assignments from the book. As I’ve said before, I want to feel like I can design my own pages, not just make changes to existing pages.

CIOS 256 Reflection #1

Well, I suppose I'm coming at this reflection a little late and from greatly changed circumstances. When I signed up for this class, I was anticipating doing a little web site maintenance for one of my UAF jobs, and thus wanted to study Dreamweaver a bit. My attempts to start the course were greatly delayed by a change of jobs, and now I find that I have had to build sites from scratch for my new position. They're not by any means pretty, but I did them. Now if only they had been put up instead of languishing on someone's desk for the past months, I could show them to you.

I think in terms of the speed of the class, the lessons thus far have been proceeding at a good pace. My first instinct was to say that we should have done more than just putting a few lines of text on the first pages we created. However, I can say that because I have done more than that in Dreamweaver. For a beginner, I think that working through to the point of creating files and putting that line or two of text up is more than enough.