Camilla Lützhøft Stahlschmidt » meta

Welcome back

Camilla — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:40:55 +0000

1st semester and exams are over, and after a short break we are back and ready for the 2nd semester. I have made a few changes to the blog. The pages containing feeds from my two group blogs are no longer active as they will no longer be updated and therefore will not be relevant. I am thinking of adding a new page called Sketchbook, but for now I am just using the tag called sketch.

A new semester means new courses, so I have added a new category for each course:

KF01 – Crossmedia

BDMK – Digital Media Culture

BSPR – Sketching & Prototyping

Even though the blog is no longer part of an exam project, I will do my best to keep it alive. Mostly for my own sake. I have chosen to keep the Changelog for now, but I am not planning on making any big changes to the blog any time soon.

The individual expression

Camilla — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:59:01 +0000

I don’t want my blog to look like the typical academic blog; it is not gonna be minimalistic or in white and blue shades as some people might expect. It is important for me that the blog reflects my personality, my style, and what we do at the Digital Media & Design program at ITU. Therefore I have considered ethos (Aristoteles), image and identity before designing the layout.

As I see it, Digital Media & Design is more colorful than many other academic programs. Before designing the blog I put down some keywords describing my impression and opinions of it: Innovation, interaction, fun, theoretical, practical, academic, cool, new, urban, forward, creative.

Then I analyzed my own identity and thought about how I want to show myself as a person (the image). I put down these keywords: Young, designer, music, fashion, casual, creative, developer, sailor, swedish, cool, head phones, colors.

I spent some days thinking about how I could use these keywords and express my personality through the blog design. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to use a picture in the background to get the user’s attention and make a clear statement right away. As you can see in the changelog, I tried out a few different backgrounds.

Here are some more things that inspired me:

I came up with the idea of taking a photo of my desk at home. It is always messy, and my favourite things are laying around on it. So I picked out the things from the desk that matched my keywords the best and arranged them to fit the content of the website.

The things on the desk in the photo are:

My iPod: I never leave home without it.

My sailor head phones: They show that I am into music, and at the same time they show my love for everything nautical.

The drawing, the pencil and the glue stick: These things show creativity.

The badges: Showing the logos of two of my favourite Swedish bands – Broder Daniel and Shout Out Louds.

My sunglasses: Simply because I always wear them. Even in the Winter sometimes.

The two books: One is about fashion, and the other is about web-design. Two great interests of mine.

Overall these things put together in the background picture show what kind of person is behind this blog. To make the rest of the design match the background picture I used Kuler to create a color theme from the picture of my desk. At first I wanted to use both blue and pink for head lines and links, but it seemed to be a little too much. Therefore I decided to only use pink. It makes the links and head lines stand out from all the white text.

I have chosen to use a box with opacity for the content of the website, because I still want the background to show even though I post a lot of things. Each post is put in a box without opacity to improve readability.

My ambitions and the actual implementation

Camilla — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:36:00 +0000

As this blog eventually will be containing loads of information, I have from the beginning had an ambition to make the navigation and structure as simple as possible. Therefore I have placed a global menu at the top of the site, so the user can easily get around. The most important thing about the site is of course the blog, so I placed this on the front page. The front page also contains links to all the categories, which are equal to our courses at ITU. The fourth category is called “Everything Else”, and this is where I post things that does not have anything to do with the courses.

Personally I am a huge fan of RSS-feeds, so when I saw that the RSS-button was placed in the bottom of the site when using this theme, I decided to move it to the top. It should be easy for the reader to subscribe to my posts.

As I mentioned earlier, the global menu shows links to all the pages. The “About Me” page is a static page telling a bit about the person behind the blog. The “Group 12″ and “Guerrilla” pages are imported feeds from my two group blogs. I have chosen to show these feeds on my website, because I want to show everything we do at ITU. The “Changelog” page is also a static page. If you want to read more about why I have chosen this solution, you can read this post.

I have placed a tag cloud on the front page, so that my visitors can get an overview of the blog content right away, when they enter the site.

One of the things I would consider changing some time on the future is the blog title. I think it looks a little too boring right now and does not match the rest of the design as well as it could. I would like to use a more untraditional font, that I could save as a jpg-file instead of just one of the standard web fonts.

I also meant to add a different color to the active links in the global menu. Unfortunately I did not have time for this due to my many, many troubles with the server at one.com. It was quite a pity that I did not have the time for this, because I think it is a very important part of the overview and usability, that the user at all times is able to see where he or she is.

If you are curious to see more about the structure of this site, take a look at the wireframe and blueprint.

I have chosen to blog in English, because I want to reach a larger target group. I am considering studying abroad for one or two semesters, and my plan is to continue with this blog through my entire education at ITU.

The blog is optimized for Firefox 3.5.5 and a 1440 x 900 px screen resolution. I know that some things look different in other browsers or on bigger screens, and I would like to solve that problem some time in the future. For now I do not know how to but hopefully I will learn some day…

The group work

Camilla — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:36:31 +0000

In the beginning of this semester my FPW-group handed in assignments together and worked on the group blog. But as it turned out the blog and group work on this course were not part of the exam, we stopped blogging as a group and focused on our individual blogs. But we did create a group contract and agreed to meet every week and help each other with the personal blogs. However this did not work out. As we got closer to the exam hand-ins everyone worked by themselves at different places and times. In my opinion the FPW group work was lacking a clear purpose, and as it was not a part of the final exam evaluation it became trivial to all of us. Some of us have helped each other out when blog troubles came up, but we did not meet every Friday as it says in the group contract. We figured out that it is much better to just meet whenever a problem occurs.

The fact that there has not been so much work with the FPW-group does not mean that I have not been given inputs and ideas from fellow students. I have been studying with other students from the course, whom I have met with every day any way. It seems easier to just ask the people you are with instead of having to arrange a group meeting.

I see what the FPW-group was originally meant to do, but as I mentioned it just became irrelevant because their was no final group hand-in for the exam. The group had both strengths and weaknesses. I think we all had very different opinions on design and layout, and we could definitely use that when discussing our personal blogs. Every group member had different skills, so we could help each other out. But one of the main problems with the group was that no one took the initiative to meet or do anything as a group. I think that if there had been a group exam project on this course, we could have worked together way better than we actually did.

Regarding the changelog

Camilla — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:58:18 +0000

Tess mentioned the changelog in her lecture last week and how she was wondering why some of us have chosen to use a static page in stead of posts for this. I feel the need to do a post explaining my choice.

To me the changelog is mainly something that I update for the lecturers, and I don’t find it relevant for other visitors on my blog. Therefore I don’t want these news to be posted on my front page. I could of course use a plugin that would hide my changelog posts from the front page and post them to a dynamic changelog page instead. But this way I would have more than one page containing posts, and I think this could become quite confusing for my visitors. One of my goals with this blog is to make it simple and easy to use. I have made the changelog a static page to avoid information overload and to reduce complexity.