Design Statement
My professional interest and communities mainly currently lay in the web development world, more specifically the Ruby on Rails framework. I have been a developer for about two years, mainly self-taught from own experience, attending user groups and talking to other people in the Rails community. My secondary professional interest is graphic and web design, because I believe the combination of both developmental skills and design skills form a very potent combination that grants me more versatility and thus more value to the company I work for and my clients. I am also trying to network with people in the design communities as I believe it is always a beneficial relationship.
My skill set is varied (you could say ‘jack-of-all-trades’, but you’d have to pay the price for that pun), but it mainly centres around technical ability. I have a knack for picking up technical skills quickly, and this is probably attributed to pre-existing experience and familiarity with other systems.
I started programming when I was 9 years old, when I wrote my first program in BASIC after self-teaching myself the basic syntax. This was followed by Microworlds (Logo), then Visual Basic at 10 and 11. I started web development when I was 13. PHP, HTML, CSS, and SQL were my first foray into the development world. I toyed around with XML/XSLT technologies, and attempted to study C++ and Python. I believe the key to becoming proficient was reading the manual and looking for help myself instead of relying on other people to tell me what I need to do. Also, I believe it’s easier for me to learn if whatever I am learning has set rules.
Which, unfortunately, is why I believe I have so much difficulty learning design. Design has a few set rules, which are documented by rules such as rule of thirds, accessibility, interface design, usability and so on. However, the creative aspect does not have any set rules or steps to follow, which makes it much harder for me to understand ‘how’ to design. I was initially hoping that KIB216 taught design, but unfortunately that was not the case and it was more about HTML/CSS and applying design skills in a way that it was ideal for the web. Apart from web design, I want to learn logo design, graphics design and typography.
Apart from developmental skills, I have extensive experience in all major operating systems (Windows, OS X, Linux), as well as film/sound editing and special effects from three years of film experience.
I’m not sure what my design aesthetic is yet, but judging from what I generally like, it would be simple, clean, abstract, but with an element of randomness/grunge. I’m not proficient enough in design to duplicate the more elaborate designs more experienced and specialised designers can do, but I believe I have the technical ability for it. Also, considering I am generally level-headed, my design aesthetic will probably err on the less outrageous side. Naturally, I believe that this will the passage of time due to more experience in the world of design.
Tenative Blog Design
Blog Index
Blog Post
Portfolio
Critique #3: Design*Sponge
My third and final critique is Design*Sponge (http://www.designspongeonline.com/). Design*Sponge is another design blog, although the tone is more informal and personal than Smashing Magazine.
The design is extremely arty and uses a great deal of textures, which is a stark contrast compared to Smashing Magazine. It is a three column fixed-width centred layout with a thin navigation bar on the left, and the search, RSS, Twitter and advertisements down the side. Elements like frayed edges of cloth, coloured paper, lace/frills, ribbons and translucent tape make up the majority of the design. As a result, serif fonts were used to keep in with the arty style. Given that the blog has plenty of DIY home art projects and focuses more on physical crafts and the such, this design works very well.
The only social aspect of the site is comments, and there seems to be a good quality of comments on most blog posts. There is a Twitter linked down the side, but there was no tweets embedded into the webpage, which means that users have to actually click on the link and then determine if it’s worth following from that, which takes more effort and hence users are less likely to do so.
Geek, gamer, developer, and a part-time ninja. I work at