Still battling away with CSS....

Well, I think I've finally got my head around the basic HTML & CSS (and not a moment too soon!!!) After a few late nights and a few more grey hairs, my site is starting to take shape. Thanks for the deadline extension Ruairi, much appreciated and needed!!!!

Monday evenings meeting with Gwen went grand. How come my mistakes only seem so glaringly obvious when they are plainly pointed out to me :) Anyhow …. I passed… woohoo!

Book Covers

Here is a good blog I found on Book Cover Designs:


http://covers.fwis.com/

Art Deco

Well, this last week has been very hectic what with trying to complete my research proposal, literature review and Vis Comm presentation. I just about got on top of them all, and now must return more focus on my website for Internet authoring.

My presentation was on the Art Deco design movement. Here are some more pictures I took in the Art Deco district of Miami Beach last March.

Here's a link to more info on Miami's Art Deco district:

http://www.mdpl.org/

Are bloggers parasites??? :)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/15/comment.media

Is Second Life Environmentally Friendly???

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php

This is an interesting list of "People, places, ideas and trends you need to know":
www.wired.com/geekipedia

Here is some great graphic art I found while researching my Vis Comm presentation. The name of the artist is Paul Sizer. I really like the use of illustrations with real photo backgrounds. The lighting effects are also superb. Check them out here:
http://www.paulsizer.com/bpm/bpm_front.htm

I was looking around the web for definition/explanation of Web 2.0 and found this list.

Web 1.0 was about reading,Web 2.0 is about writing
Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

This differentiates the two in a simple and effective way. What do you think?

The last 7 days

I have been playing around a bit with the Internet Authoring testsite that Ruairi sent us and can see from this the benefits of using style sheets. The classes and ids topic that we touched on last Wednesday reminded me of objects/classes from C++ programming for my degree. I suppose the ideas behind both are quite similar.
Here are some sites that have useful web design tutorials:

http://www.htmldog.com/ http://www.expertrating.com/courseware/XHTMLCourse/XHTML-Introduction-1.asphttp://www.w3schools.com/

I found the Visual Communication Assignments (Roadsign & Typography) very enjoyable. I started by sketching a few ideas I had for each option by hand. Once I was happy with two designs for each it was time to open Illustrator. As I had never used this application before I was a bit worried at how I would transfer my ideas to screen. However once I got going I found it to be a very intuitive program and in fact was inspired even more by some of the effects/functions available. I also found some great Illustrator online tutorials that you should check out:
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/resources/tutorials/
Here is one of my Roadsigns:

Some tunes

If you like you can check out some of my tracks here:
www.myspace.com/mistertickle

My First Blog

Hello all !

As you can see by the title, this is my first ever blog. I have recently started an MSc Course in Applied Digital Media. This course is being held in Griffith College Dublin. So far I am finding it to be very enjoyable and interesting. As I have never studied at night before I initially found it a challenge to adjust to the schedule but am settling in just fine now. It helps at lot that I work quite close to the college. This definitely eases the burden of commuting.

I study mainly at the weekend and play basketball on Tuesday evenings. It has been an average start to the season with us winning 2 of 4 games thus far in the league. Also we are through to the 3rd round of cup. My other interests include travelling, music production, mountain biking, DJ'ing, attending music/comedy gigs, reading, piano/keyboard, bass guitar.

This weekend I plan on finishing off my Visual Communication assignments. I missed this week’s lab with sickness (hope I didn’t miss too much!!). Also I will be continuing my study on the Research Methods assignment.