Week 7, October 11

There Is No Perfect Layout

Session Recording #

Quick Project 1 Recap #

Before we move on, let’s briefly discuss your first projects from last week. Overall, these were great—but we wanted to pull out some points here:

  1. Response to Issue / Feedback

    Many of you didn’t address or resolve the code and design Issue tasks we left. We identified many of the subsequent points here in this feedback! (It took a long time.) This is disappointing.

  2. Readability Fundamentals

    Tons of great, expressive type work! But in this, we lost some sight of the basics—many projects had base paragraph text that was too small, and line lengths that were too long, justified-with-lots-of-voids. Put yourself in the mind of your user: is this comfortable to read?

  3. Attention to Detail

    We know this a new medium for most of you, but we 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.

  4. Smaller Commits, More Comments

    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.

  5. Ask Questions Earlier, and More Often

    We heard from maybe half a dozen of you, and also didn’t see much engagement with each other. We want to see a lot more activity in the Slack channel. Everyone is going through the same stuff!

Reading Discussion #

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

Unit 2 Reading Responses

Further reading #

Over our second unit, you should again peruse these additional readings on your own schedule. We expect you to use and reference these in your work:

Our Second Project #

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

Project 2: Spread

Responsive Design! #

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

Responsive Design

For Next Week #