I find this link useful, although there are a lot of broken links/images. :S This is not bad as well. After reading, here are some of my opinions:
- Content is important. I was looking at a bunch of good webpages, and most of them structure their content for their audience very well. There were some that were quick to answer the audience ("what can you gain from us"). Some even did it in a highly camouflage-y manner (the example they gave was Twitter, which I kind of agree, because after reading the Twitter About Us page, you kind of end up thinking in your head, "yeah, Twitter seems okay to get..."). But yes, content is very important.
- There's a lot of artsy stuff involved. Things like visual weight, Rule of Thirds, colour wheel, whitespaces etc., are stuff that you can learn from other fields. For example, you'll probably know Rule of Thirds if you do photography. You might know about whitespaces if you do icon designing (which I suck at.) In any case, my next artsy endeavour should be about the colour wheel! (Which I will do after the final project of course. T_T Too busy!) I'm going to have fun mixing lots of colours together!
- I think it's easy to make a website, because Twitter Bootstrap makes it exceedingly easy. Because of this, I like graphics-intensive websites a lot more, e.g. Komodo Media. I keep going "awww..." at this site. I'm not sure how tough it is to slice everything up (from photoshop or something) and piece everything up again in code (because I haven't done any websites that are image-intensive), but the effort would be well-worth it. Okay, if I draw better, and if I manage to get better image editing programmes (MS Paint should totally allow transparency to be saved >.>), I will try and do something more image-intensive. But failing that, simple and clean interfaces are good too!
In other news, I think I have been a bad tutor. :S I will go pay more attention to my tutees. I was thinking about it, and I have this belief - "You're a good student if you can understand what concepts your lecturer is trying to test you, and you're a good tutor if you can understand what your students are thinking." I'm not really on the same wavelength as my students, so I will buck up and try to think like them. I will talk to them more!
And enough slacking for the weekend! Tomorrow I have to rush through lots of work. T_T
Making a really good, aesthetically pleasing web-page is hard work. Particularly for someone like myself who has very little by way of "aesthetics taste".
ReplyDeleteI think we really ought to do a workshop next time on aesthetics, covering the stuff you talked about here, like color wheels and rule of thirds.
Haha, I think you give yourself too little credit on the "aesthetics taste" part. I think if something looks good, then it's good. All the fancy "colour wheel" and "rule of thirds" stuff is only used to justify why people think it's good. I'm pretty sure there are some stuff that violates some of these "rules" but end up looking good still.
Delete(Here, I stop to make an analogy to music. In music, there are natural chord progressions, e.g. the Canon one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM), but good composers always know how to alter the chords so that it sounds even better somehow. So, chord progressions == good design rules, but sometimes, I think it's okay to break the rules a little. =))
But despite that, I think yeah, it would be good to do a workshop next time! If you can't get Su Yuen, I sabo my team-mates Benjamin/Kai. ^^