Week 5: Color

Color use on websites seems simple. It seems like the designer simply liked a color and then decided to use it. Or perhaps it is a school color or color-theme. I hadn't really considered color use until this week. I found that I tend to prefer a darker background with light text-- aesthetically I just prefer this.

This week's website, http://colorsontheweb.com, has some really helpful information regarding colors and web design. I found the tab on color contrast to be very helpful because I don't really have an eye for this (which is weird because my mom and sister are both artists--I guess I missed that gene?). I think contrast of value would be really cool to utilize in web design because it draws attention to the colors.

This weeks readings are chapter 9 and 10 in Creating a website and chapter 3 in Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

Chapter 9:

Chapter 9 focuses on page layout. This is probably one of the most important elements of web design in terms of usability. Have you ever been to a site that didn't seem formatted correctly to your screen? I sometimes find blogs like that, and it makes reading them very challenging. MacDonald offers important info about page layout and html info for making tables. Important!

Chapter 10:

Ahh...multipart pages. Here we go. This is important and something I've been challenged with on the web project. I found the discussion of frames (p. 266) really interesting because it seems really useful. By breaking the window this way, we can see multiple pages.

Really really useful in this chapter is the discussion beginning on page 289 about making a new page template in Dreamweaver.

Beautiful Web Design, Chapter 3: Textures!!

I'm going to be completely honest--I think texture use on entertainment websites is pretty cool, but if we use them on professional sites, I think they look a little unprofessional and distracting. Now, the elements of texture, like volume and depth (p. 75) should be applied to all types of website, but the obvious textured background gets on my nerves.