Type, Style, and Technicalities

I believe that most of what I've taken out of our readings for the past two weeks can be summarized by Donald Norman's article, Attractive Things Work Better This is a pretty simple concept. People like to look at attractive things. If you display something attractive it will draw attention thus you will have more viewers and said item will be successful. Ok, I got it. After the first week I was relieved to hear this. I have enough sense to pull together an outfit or decorate my apartment, if design is my number one seller I am set up for success! Right? Wrong! 

It turns out that making something attractive on the web is quite challenging for me! I am entering a whole new domain (pun intended). While watching Helvetica is entertaining, the six hour practicum on Typography for Web Designers is less leisurely of an activity to say the least. I find myself watching a six minute video over and over, pausing to create the text code in Dreamweaver and asking, "Just what is wrong with creating this text in microsoft word and copy and pasting it into Dreamweaver anyway?"  I'm sure I will learn the problem in time but for now I find myself fascinated by the reading and timidly excited about getting down in the trenches to apply this to my final project.

As we move further and further into the digital world simply saying, "I don't know how to do that" won't be enough. Right now a background in digital humanities gives us a "one up" per se, a separate skill set that enhances our research and professional resume. But when will it be dibilitating to not know how to create your own website? Whether it comes natural or not, if design is the most important aspect of a website it's not enough to have an image, you need the technical skills to complete production. 

Comments

[David McKenzie]

You have a good point there about the technical skills needed to create the site. I'll do some simple things in print design, and that requires many fewer technical skills--and you can do a lot more with it. I can just move things around, and they work!

By contrast, yesterday I spent several hours trying to get a menu bar across the header of my webpage, because no matter what, I wanted that! I was excited when I finally got it to work, but yeah, something that would have taken 2 minutes for print took hours for the web! Granted, next time it won't take that long, but, still. The technical skills make it all the tougher...

[Rosendo Flores]

I, too, feel a little bit like I've been thrown to the wolves the past two weeks. It is foreign enough to feel frustrated, yet it still feels vital and worthwhile. Lindsey and I spent hours in the library working on a few thinks in DW. Not a good feeling. But, as David points out, once you muscle through something once, the next time it will be easier, and so and so on.

[Objectfiles.wordpress.com]

Your final point reminds me of Stephen Ramsay's controversial argument for a new breed of coding/styling/building historians. Is it necessary for the scholar presenting his work in a digital format to understand the technical minutiae without going through a designer? I think we're approaching that point. Based on what we've read and watched about typography alone, it seems that if we want to control our message on the Web, we need to be fluent in the different strategies for doing so. But like you say, at least we're getting a head start.