Wow, I’m behind on my reflections, so they’ll come fast and furious in the next week. I have, in fact, been experimenting with a variety of the tools in the toolkit. There just never seems to be quite enough time to jot down my thoughts. I need to develop a new kind of discipline for this course.
I’ve never created a web page, so experimenting with the various software for this part of the toolkit was a brand-new experience for me. In general it seemed very straightforward … until the part where I had to export came in. That was the real challenge – saving the file in the format that WebCT liked and that I could find on my brand-new Mac (I’m adding a new operating system to the mix for this course. I’ve never touched a Mac until about six weeks ago. Wouldn’t want the learning curve to be shallow!) As well, it took some experimenting to translate WYSIWYG into what-you-see-is-how-WebCT-gets – the files look too small, too squinched at the top of the page and so on. Like any system I suspect it would take me a few weeks of practice in order to determine what type size, kearning, and so on work well in the web editor for uploading. Just because it looks nice in the Amarya box does not, in fact, mean it will look nice once loaded.
I work in a context where design is an important part of what we do. I’m involved in decisions about design all the time (although I really, really hate covers – if I had my drothers, all my books would have plain brown paper…) and it is an interesting challenge to translate the design knowledge that I’ve picked up over the years into the digital space, where the rules are quite different. In digital space, you want to use sans serif type; you never want to use sans serif in a book, because it just isn’t that readable over long stretches. I’m curious as to how the sans serif convention for web pages developed and why? It raises a chicken-and-egg question for me – do people read in small snippets on the web because we don’t use a readable typeface or do we use a typeface more suitable for short passages because no one reads long ones? Something to ask the design director at work!
Laura
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