Week Nº 7

We’ll be sending your individual Manuscript feedback and evaluations by next class time. Some brief overall notes:

• Attributions?

  A good number of folks brought in other material that we didn’t discuss in class⁠—whether from previous knowledge, peers, MDN, who knows⁠—and we didn’t see much in the way of attributions. We think we’ve been clear on this⁠—you must note it and explain the usage and your understanding.

• Smaller Commits, More Comments, Clear Indentation

  We’d like to see better code hygiene! Commit smaller changes much more often, and with more useful messages. It shows us how you are working through things, and makes your code more resilient to errors. Likewise⁠—comment your code! We didn’t see enough of this.

• Don’t repeat yourself

  D.R.Y! Following from above: in code, any time you’re repeating yourself there is probably a better way! In CSS, duplicate declarations probably mean you can use grouped selectors, nesting, reuse a class, etc. Sometimes this means going back across your work and consolidating/​tidying. We want you to think systemically!

• Readability Fundamentals

  Tons of great, expressive type work! But in this, we lost some sight of the basics⁠—many projects still had base paragraph text that was uncomfortable to read⁠—lacking contrast, too-short or too-long lines. Put yourself in the mind of your user: is this comfortable to read?

• Attention to Detail

  We know this a new medium for most of you, and we might have used this analogy before: in a movie, you don’t want to see a reflection of the cameraman in a mirror. In design, you don’t want to see typos or misused punctuation. It just takes you out of the work.

  Said another way: you are the attention to detail. That’s all we are!

• Quiet folks in the chat

  We didn’t hear from probably half of you in the chat! We’d like to see more activity in the Slack channel, and engagement with each other there too. Everyone is going through the same stuff! And it’ll only be getting more challenging.

We’ll start our next unit, There Is No Perfect Layout with a discussion of the readings from last week:

• Continuity and Change
  Max Bill, 1953

• The Web’s Grain
  Frank Chimero, 2015

• Unit Nº 2: Reading Responses

And we’ll go through the details of your next project:

Project Nº 2: Spread

Today’s main topic is responsive design, which hinges on the use of media queries:

Responsive Design

A rare, second topic⁠—about tools to help us work responsively:

DevTools (Web Inspector)

• Review our two topics from today! We’re going to have to move faster here, but these are rich references for your work.

• Connect with your partner for Project 2, Spread. Together, decide on the text you’ll use and add it to this list:

  Project Nº 2: Reading Selection

• Read your selection and discuss it with your partner!

• Then sketch collaboratively with your partner to develop three initial directions for your design. Do this together! Make sure these are in the class project and be sure to send us your links:

  • Project Nº 2: Sketches

  • Submission Form