An important part of our Graphic Design education here at Marywood is our interactive and web design classes. Web design is a huge part of graphic design and it is really important that all of us have the skills and knowledge before going into our design careers. It goes without saying that our generation has a great understanding of how important being online, and having a good website, is. Our online life-style gives us good intuition of what a good website looks like. We know how we would want to navigate a site, what makes us stay, and what organization works well. I mean, we have been to a lot of websites both well-designed and not.
It has been and exciting (and stressful) time for our Interactive Design II class. This is because we have been learning how to make a Bootstrap website. This term may sound foreign but all of us have seen a Bootstrap website. It is a site that collapses and expands based on a device’s viewport (screen size), so it can easily go from a smart phone to computer screen. They are characteristically wide designs and often have a large photo header at the top. It is where a lot of websites are heading now that smart phones and tablets have to be taken into large account. They are really cool!
These websites have been very cool to make, but have also been a huge challenge. We all have had to dive into a whole new way of making a website. I was pretty nervous because there is a lot new motions, and effects that we also had to take into account. Our websites needed to scroll correctly, collapse, and expand well too. So we had all of our usual coding to remember, plus new bootstrap elements. With these new skills I made a website about Dublin, Ireland. So, we also needed to put our own content together. If just thinking about this makes you breathe small breaths, then you feel how I felt when I started! But, like everything else, it comes down to time, focus, and hard work.
Like our other projects, the hardest ones are often the most rewarding. I am really proud that I put the time into really trying to understand the Bootstrap material. Although, there is always room for improvement, I feel like I learned a lot from this first taste of a new web skill. So now that I talked about it so much! let me show you some screenshots!
