HTML & CSS
This week we learnt about HTML, CSS, Webflow, and responsive web-design.
I found this lecture to be quite interesting, and useful.
I thought it was great to get a demonstration on how to use Webflow, as this is what I will be using to build my portfolio website. I had built websites in first year using HTML and CSS, and I found it to be quite fiddly and frustrating at the start.
At the beginning of this lecture, Kyle did a run-through of HTML and CSS, as well as speaking about responsive web-design.
Responsive web-design means that your website will be able to scale to the screen size of any device. Kyle suggested that we read “Responsive Web Design” by Ethan Marcotte.
Marcotte believes that we can design for an optimal viewing experience, and make our designs adaptable. To do this, we need to practise responsive design.
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
From just the first page of this book, I was already interested in what Marcotte had to say.
He wrote about how he found that some businesses had created different domains and sites for different form factors. They have a separate one for mobile, and another for desktop. Marcotte questions what the alternative to doing this would be – and the obvious answer to us now, is to create our website so that it is responsive. He continuously compares the web and web design to humans. I found this to be a weirdly interesting take on design, but it has given me a whole different perception of design.
He suggests that we should create sites that can adapt to their constraints, rather than struggling to continuously overcome them ourselves; creating and re-creating the same site so that it works the same on different platforms.
We should use a flexible grid-based layout, and images in order to do this.
Marcotte then goes on to teach you how to create these flexible grids using HTML and CSS.
This goes hand-in-hand with what we learnt in class today.
He then teaches you how to make your images flexible, also using HTML and CSS.
Marcotte mentioned that, as designers, we are constantly choosing between flexibility and control – but that we shouldn’t have to.
He says “the flexibility of a design doesn’t have to be a liability. Instead, it can be another opportunity to practice our craft, to better communicate with a certain class of users, or to solve another set of problems affecting a particular type of device.”
All in all, I found this book to be very educational. I didn’t find myself wanting to skip over lines or miss pages, because he wrote it in such a captivating way – connecting responsive design closely to us as people.
I’m glad that Kyle told us to give this book a read, as I enjoyed doing so, and I feel like I have learnt a lot from it.