Layout: Graphic Design Referenced

Day 14/150

"Throughout the myriad disciplines in graphic design and it's numerous manifestations, one fundamental remains constant: layout. No matter what the project is--big or small, online or printed, single- or multi-page, flat or three-dimensional, square or round--images and/or text must be placed and organized consciously. Layout can be objectively described as the physical properties (spacing , sizing positioning) and arrangement of the design elements within a determined area and, ultimately, as the finished design. This leads to the subjective assessment of how effectively those properties are arranged within that area--and to heated discussions among designers. While a layout can be executed in infinite ways, a few principles must be taken into consideration so informed decisions can be made on how to exploit it."

Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design, p. 23

The web is a particularly peculiar canvas, and this quote gets to the heart of why it is especially challenging. Working on a layout relies on working "within a determined area", but the area available to a web designer is determined according to different dimensions than other kinds of graphic design. For a print piece I might understand that I'm working on a sheet of paper with a fixed size of, for example 8.5" x 11". A web designer's page varies from viewer to viewer, and even moment to moment as a viewer can resize the browser window at any time. I guess a web designer just needs to focus on how elements are arranged in relation to the other elements, within contexts of classes of potential uses, be it mobile phone, netbook and tablet, or full sized widescreen display.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot. 

Drupal Rules

Day 13/150

Spent productive moments today sifting through the relatively impenetrable documentation for the Drupal Rules module. The stuff is seriously bad. Pure bloodymindedness saw me through to a modicum of understanding, to wit, I understand that to automate a task you first create a {rule set} which takes {arguments} and inside it create a {rule} which has {conditions} (but you don't use conditions here) and {actions} (which you do set up here). From the {triggered rules} section you configure the {condition} (your trigger) and {action}, which invokes the {rule set} you set up first.

I'm left frustrated, however, nagged by questions I asked in the Drupal IRC channel, but which were not answered:

Fighting my way through the Rules module documentation and I can't get my head around it, conceptually. Why do I have rules in rule sets if I can only ever address a rule set (i.e., from triggered rules) rather than a rule? Why can't I have a set of rules that deal with managing content and then build triggered rules that invoke rules within that rule set, depending on the condition?

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Drupal Automation

Day 12/150

WixsonIT has been migrated from the shared hosting plan to the virtual dedicated server over the last few days, and has been updated from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to boot. I'm learning quite a lot about Drupal 6 in the process. In particular I'm learning that the workflow_ng module I used in Drupal 5 (played around with, is more like) has been turned into a module called Rules, and actions and triggers have been incorporated into the core of the Drupal program. It used to be that a lot of the automation you could achieve in Drupal was done with program plugins called Actions and Workflow.

So far, from what I understand, Rules is extensible, and allows for all kinds of automation not previously attainable. For instance, it integrates with CCK and Organic Groups, I presume to allow you to move stepwise through processes depending on the values of custom fields or membership in a group. I'm really interested to learn how to do those things.

I'm jumping into the deep end here. Today I watched the video on the Rules project site and did the second tutorial in the documentation, but I have yet to really grok what I'm doing.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

RBGa

Day 11/150

Microsoft really is a pain. It's an impediment to progress. Today I learned about using RBGa in CSS3. The "a" in RGBa stands for "Alpha" and it means the degree to which a thing is opaque or transparent. Having translucent color on the web opens up all kinds of design possibilities which have been available to print designers forever.  I'm really frustrated, though, that Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, doesn't support the RGBa feature of CSS3 -- not even it's most recent version. Come on! I have to use a special (and long) work-around to achieve in IE something I can do in every other browser?

Another reason not to use Internet Explorer, ever.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

FCE and the Panasonic TM300

Day 10/150

I finally got around to installing Final Cut Express 4 Upgrade on my computer so I can use the files being produced by my lovely Panasonic TM300's. It nearly broke my heart to start working through the user manual information about the "Log and Transfer" window that you use to "ingest" the camera's files only to get a "Error: no data" message on the first attempt. Some furious Googling and I arrived at the answer. By carefully following these directions, after completing the update to Final Cut Express 4.0.1, I got the TM300 files to import neatly into my project. Hurray! There's two hours of fretting I won't get back, though.

Topic : Panasonic TM300 log and transfer crash when trying to import/prev MTS files

First, start by trashing your preferences exactly as detailed in this link:
http://fcpbook.com/Misc1.html

Then, some things to try before ingesting again:

• Make sure you have the correct Easy Setup selected (for 1920x1080 media at 29.97fps, use the AVCHD Apple Intermediate Codec 1920x1080i60 preset)
• In the Log and Transfer window, select preferences (from the "gear" button in the upper right). Make sure the audio is set to Plain Stereo
• In that same preference window, click the button to Clear the Cache

 The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.