This is the part two of me looking back at what I have learned from Monday’s ixd101 lectures over the past 12 weeks and what impact the things I’ve leaned have had on my work going forward.
Week 7- Introduction to Html
In that week’s lecture we looked at an introduction to html. There’s a lot to get familiar with but it wasn’t as confusing as I thought it would be. At the start of the lecture I learned the distinctions between the web and the internet. I learned a bit about the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Burners Lee and I was informed that html is not a programming language. We looked at all the basic html tags like <h1> and <p> and their anatomy. These were relatively simple and easy to remember actually so at this point I think its safe to say that I know them off by heart. We looked at the html structural building blocks like <head>, <div> and <article>.
We were given exercises for a text on John Baskerville and one on The History of type where we had to apply the html we’d learned in html to them. Here is a link to my blog post on that: https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/laurabfoy/2020/11/11/ixd102-week07-intro-to-html-excerises/
In this lecture we also had a little critique session of our 9 iteration project on Miro. I was great to get some constructive feedback on what I had done as well as to get to see the different approaches my classmates took to the project.
This weeks lecture content proved very beneficial to me especially when it came to applying html to my web essay. I had a the basics of html I learned about in this lecture down at that point so it came easier.
Week 8- Introduction to CSS
That week we were introduced to css also known as cascading style sheets, a language used to control the presentation of documents written in markup language eg. for styling html web pages. We looked at css rules, their anatomy, how to write them and we looked at the different ways css can be used to change the look of html pages. We were tasked with applying stylesheets to the html pages we were work on which up until then had just been set to the default stylesheet of the browser. We started by adding a simple reset and then developed proper stylesheets. We also looked at more html like adding hyperlinks, a navigation bar and list elements.
Here is a link to my blog post on the the updates to my Baskerville and The History of Type pages from that week: https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/laurabfoy/wp-admin/post.php?post=242&action=edit
All that I learned about css swell as the new stuff on html from this lecture proved very useful when working on my web essay and my portfolio site. I actually just really enjoyed experimenting with css stylesheets on these projects.
Week 9- Web Typography
That week’s lecture was all about web typography. I learned how to apply fonts from Google fonts and Adobe font to my html pages. We also looked at the important details of typography like punctuation and the right and wrong ways of presenting it. We were also given an exercise where we had to apply html with and appropriate font link and a css stylesheet to another body of text on Baskerville and try to match it as closely as possible to examples that were given.
Here’s a link to a blog post on the updates I made to Baskerville and The History of type from that week: https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/laurabfoy/2020/12/01/1xd-week09-applying-fonts-to-the-history-of-type/
The lecture content of that week was very important for my to learn about as it meant that I would be able to apply the appropriate fonts to my Paula Scher essay as well as my portfolio page.
Week 10- Tables and Images
This lecture taught me all about how to add images and tables in html swell as how to style them with css. Inserting images was a lot more complicated than I had initially thought as you have to reduce the image’s with photoshop so that it doesn’t make the page end up taking a really long time load. Apparently you can’t make it too small though or else it will look bad and also you can’t style a big image to be way smaller because that will also look bad? Basically I understand the process of how to add them but I don’t really understand why I have to do the things I have to do.. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. We also looked at adding tables and that process although a bit tedious, was nearly a confusing as adding images. That was all for that lecture I think as it ended early for tutorial sessions to take place after lunch.
Even if it confused me a good bit, I still learned some valuable information in this lecture. Here is a link to a blog post on the updates I made to Baskerville and the History of Type based on what I was learned that week: https://blogs.ulster.ac.uk/laurabfoy/?p=256&preview=true
Week 11- CSS Grid
This lecture was pretty much dedicated to looking at css grid. Apparently in the olden days people used tables to map out webpages but you’re not supposed to do that. Tables are for data, for positioning things where we want them instead we should use CSS grid. I initially found grid extremely confusing… It’s still confusing I won’t lie but I’m slowly but surely coming to terms with it.
We also started looking at making our own portfolio pages based on zip files Paul sent by email. It was in this lecture that I figured out how to add classes to specific areas, this was very useful knowledge to me when working on further on my portfolio and web essay. I also learned how to add a separate background to specific areas and sort of how to put images in a 3 by 3 grid but I still find how to do that confusing.
Week 12- Final Week of Semester 1
Since it was the last week of semester and the lecture was only an hour or so long we didn’t cover anything new in particular. Paul just gave us a good run down of everything we would need to submit to Blackboard for January 6th. Over all I learned a lot from this module and I’m excited to learn more in the modules of semester 2.
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