Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Today is the last day of another 9 week session. I have had the pleasure of working with a great group of people over the last 27 weeks and I am deeply saddened by your departure. I wish you much success in the future with your careers and personal lives. Please keep in touch with me. Here are a few [...]

New article alert! Digital Web Magazine has a new article on the Principles of Web Design. This is the first article in a series on design. Be sure to check DWM periodically for the rest of the series. Which image format is best – a clear explanation of the three image formats (JPEG, Gif, and PNG) and the benefits of [...]

As you can see, the class blog has a new design! David Rice was kind enough to create several terrific mock designs with graphics. Last night I coded the CSS to work with WordPress and got everything working. David, thank you so much for all of your hard work, I’m thrilled! I still have a few more CSS tweaks to [...]

Graphic Design USA has published their third annual Visual Trends Report for 2005. This report discusses the trends in logo design and mentions Logo Lounge, another site worth visiting.. The Annual Color Forecast is also very informative. SitePoint has a new article on Creating a WireFrame of your site during the planning phases. I would recommend that you all read [...]

Since most of you will be in a postition to have to provide feedback or receive critiques regarding web site designs and usability, I thought that you might find this article by Scott Berkun on How to give and receive criticism helpful. WhatTheFont? allows you to submit images of fonts that you are trying to identify to a font forum [...]

Last week I showed your browsershots.org for testing your web sites, this week I have one better, BrowserCam.com. From the BrowserCam web site: “Frequently web pages will look dramatically different depending on the configuration of the visitor’s computer. Internet users utilize a broad range of operating systems, browsers, screen resolutions, and plug-ins. Nothing is more tedious for Web Developers and [...]

On Friday we will use my basic photo editing in Photoshop as an outline for our workshop. You may want to print the tutorial and download and save the images associated with the tutorial before Friday. I also have some basic scanning directions for HP and Epson scanners for today’s lecture. Special Note: In order to use the scanner in [...]

Transparent custom corners and borders – This technique, displayed at 456 Berea, for creating flexible and transparent boxes looks wonderful; I can’t wait to try it. So much to learn, so little time! While you’re there, read and bookmark Usability testing without a budget. When you start creating “live” sites you will need to conduct usability testing and if you’re [...]

I mentioned the tutorials at Web Design from Scratch on May 5th. I would like you all to spend some time this week reviewing and analyzing the Redesign Case Studies at their site. I found a Client Spec sheet (PDF) format that I thought you might find useful when you’re planning a web site. The Web Redesign 2.0 web site [...]

Stu Nichols demonstrates a CSS method of achiving min-width in Internet Explorer. This is very useful technique when you want a column to resize depending on the visitor’s browser, but you want to maintain a minimum column width. Most browsers support the CSS min-width property, but IE does not. In order to maintain a minimum width on a column in [...]