Project Briefs
I hold in my hands the project briefs for my next year of uni, and I am excited. I love the potential that flows out of this moment. I love it that my mind is already freewheeling with a million different creative ideas, like those pieces of paper are a springboard or a starting piston that gives me the inspiration to run!
-Create a short animation (narrative or abstract and all points in between) that explores the theme of animating a joke.
-Produce a set of five thematically related, printed, image compositions… based around the theme of landscape, space and place.
-Produce an interactive web site for a company, product or service, real or imagined. Students will specify a brief as if it was issued by a client.
I’m not sure how I feel about the animation one, after all jokes often frustrate me with their lack of originality, but over-all I love the brevity of the briefs and therefore the space they give for interpretation and exploration.
Last year we had to make a portrait site about someone, so I turned this city into a person and made the site about her. I love taking a task and doing something unusual with it. I love creating web sites actually, so I’m looking forward to that one.
The issue of landscape is an interesting one. The module outline makes specific reference to the landscape tradition in British art, and there are definitely some excellent modern, abstract works using this as a reference point. Its definitely something I am looking forward to exploring photographically.
CSS Headaches
I am trying to teach myself CSS this summer and, it’s jolly hard. We were meant to have learnt it in seminars this year, and some people get it (or maybe they ‘got’ it before we even started), but I am finding myself getting a bit lost between elements, properties, attributes and tags. I’ve also been on the look out for a book that makes it all beautifully simple, but alas, I can’t seem to find one.
I understand that a CSS document tells the browser how a html page should look – for example properties such as position, sizing, colour and font.
I also think that I understand that, on a web page which has a number of tables (for example), if you wanted all the tables to be formatted the same, you’d use a class. For individual formatting within a particular table though, you’d use an id.
I’ve used ‘divs’ for content in the websites I’ve created up to now, but have stuck with AP ones before now (they don’t move around – so they’re simple to use but kinda clunky and inflexible). The div element is used to define sections in a html doc. CSS means these elements can be formatted independently. I get that much.
Today I followed a youtube tutorial and typed in all the code manually and saved the CSS stylesheet, it actually worked, but its a long way round of doing it, and all that showed me how to do was to change the font colours and sizes etc. I feel like I’m missing a big chunk of something obvious. (Also, the tutorial was narrated by a 13 year old, which made me feel a little digitally-illiterate).
I have a book, but its kinda jargon-y… what I most need to work out is how to format divs using CSS, hmm… maybe I should read the whole book before worrying that I don’t understand it. It’s just frustrating because I’m sure it’s really obvious, and I feel a bit like I’m going two sides round a triangle. I’m just waiting for that eureka moment!
