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WEEK 7

http://ilovetypography.comGreat site for typography enthusiasts. Looking around my house I’m reminded of the variety of lettering styles available!! Letters everywhere. The articles in this site review people who are not content with the thousands of styles available or simply love the challenge of creating new fonts. There’s a “free font” link following the typography link on the home page but it doesn’t seem to offer anything free. The rouge font has a great primal look to it.
http://typographica.org/ Another site for font lovers. There are some good reviews of fonts old and new.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx More resources. The overview explains Truetype technology as a common program used by Apple and Microsoft to deliver millions of fonts.
http://abc.planet-typography.com/ This site could use improvement. It has a decent appearance but the gallery was too limited and the “classic” link was dysfunctional.
http://www.alistapart.com/topics/design/typography/ Specific fonts for web designers.
http://www.rsub.com/typographic/Very cool history of typography tracing back 5000 years. The site has a good glossary as well.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/css_typography/, http://www.noupe.com/css/using-css-to-fix-anything-20-common-bugs-and-fixes.html, CSS tutorials that improve the usual CSS font capabilities,and other tutorials found here.
http://designsnips.com/ Great examples of font usage in web design. Check out the Indiana Jones crystal skull buttons.

Readings: Last week I chose my fonts Juice ITC for the heading and Aerial for the text. This week we looked at more possibilities in our web site reviews. If I can find the time to mess around with Corel Paintshop or Gimp, I’d like to produce a detailed imaged Green Gaia heading. For now, I’m gathering free images and tweeking their contrast, sharpness and brightness. Resizing and creating links from the html to my server space. I’ve been pasting floral and tree images into my web pages but the images have to be retrieved separately. The Beair chapter 4 readings offer clear explanations of formats. JPEG is the standard created by professional photographers while GIF files are primarily for logos with fewer colors(256). GIF files are compressed taking up less space and therefore easily uploaded. They can have transparent backgrounds allowing them to sit over other images, whereas JPEGs are solid. PNG is basically an upgraded version of a GIF with a greater level of transparency the graphics themselves can be rendered opaque resulting in a cool watermark effect. This chapter also reiterates the significance of CSS. Instead of painstakingly editing images and rearranging them in different design motifs, CSS allows you to establish design rules that will overhaul the effects of the pages in one clean sweep. The same text and images can be be placed in different style sheets without having to micromanage each element.
Chapter 13 in the MacDonald text prepares us with some valuable advice: How to make money through our sites. There are basically 5 ways to do this: 1) donations- an unlikely resource but possible if you can convince visitors that it’s for a noble cause. 2) advertisements- a truly annoying method, but if done well and perhaps for socially responsible or environmentally sound businesses, it can be forgiven. Unless your getting a lot of traffic which means you can command greater fees, your not going to get rich. Register with Adsense. 3) referrals- sort of like product placements, instead of ads you might get paid to write nice “reviews” for generous corporations etc. Register with Amazon Associates. 4) merchandising- pimp your wares. People are buying everything online. If you own a business without a website you are potentially losing fortunes. Attractive and well organized Web sites can allow a retailer to close shop move to a cabin in the woods and operate entirely through their webshop. 5) the last option is to charge people to see your content. This might work for database vendors or big media outlets but less likely for most anyone else.
The best option seems to be to have products or services for sale and to use a service like Paypal. You can register your site with Paypal and let them deal with the creditcard transactions. If someone tries to pull a chargeback on you, Paypal will have a better chance of fighting them and you won’t lose out. Just as important is the fact that Paypal has all the buy now buttons, add to shopping cart, etc tools ready for you to download to your site. That alone should be worth the minor commissions they receive on your transactions.
Chapter 14. Jumps into Javascript and DHTML. Javascript is used to add interactive character to your site (bells and whistles) when you see popups and mouseovers you’re seeing what Javascript can do. I won’t have time to install any tricks before the course is over but reading this chapter and going through the basics gives me an understanding of what I’ll need to know to take me to a greater level of web designing. DHTML is the next step- combining CSS into the mix.

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