Week 2B In-Class: Group Daycare Site Redesign Micro-Project & Event Website Redesign Topic

Yesterday was a surprise micro-project day!  I worked with my classmates Kira & Stephany to create a responsive redesign for our local Over the Rainbow Child Care Center.

Over the Rainbow's current site

Kira worked detail illustrations for the top of the page & the written content, & Stephany worked on typography & color schemes, while I worked on finding large, central imagery & compiling all components in our HTML & CSS.

Desktop version of our responsive redesign

Tablet version

Mobile version

As an be most easily seen in the mobile version of our responsive redesign, we had difficulties with the masthead & navigation.  We're still not sure where the trouble lied with that.

After completing this 2 1/2 hour micro-project, I found out I would be doing my major responsive redesign project for the Lititz Chocolate Walk. 

Week 2A Outside of Class: Creative Bloq Article & Event Website Redesign Exploration

Between classes I read Build a Basic Responsive Site with CSS on Creative Bloq, which first dispelled popular myths about what exactly responsive design is ("...it’s not about making sites for mobile devices, it’s about adapting layouts to viewport sizes.") and goes on to show an example of a site that in a way punished non-desktop users with less information.  Before moving into the tutorial portion of the article, a site with beautiful examples of good responsive designs called Mediaqueri.es, is referenced.

Back to exploring sites to redesign for my event website project, I came across a few:

Bowery Mission Valentine Gala

Long Island Doctor Who Convention

Lititz Chocolate Walk

NYC Horror Film Festival

Philadelphia Folk Festival 

Week 2A In-Class: Ethan Marcotte's Responsive Web Design & Beginning Event Website Redesign Research

Monday during class we reviewed our weekend reading, the foreword & first chapter of Ethan Marcotte's Responsive Web Design.  The foreword briefly talks about the origins, creation, & re-attribution of words, bringing into context newer web design lingo like web standards, ajax, & most importantly here, responsive web design.  Chapter 1 delves more into how web design has borrowed terminology from print design and other art forms, but then turns to what make responsive web design unique from these other media: namely flexibility.

Following an introductory lecture on responsive web design, we received our first project—to redesign an existing event website, with an emphasis on making it responsive.  I browsed through a number of galleries to see what other designers are doing with event websites in particular & then began searching for some poorly-designed ones to redo.