Online Journalism 2: Features and Personal Web Sites

Colour Lovers and Modern Life

As you start developing your ideas for your web sites, you'll need to think a little bit about colour. One good source of advice is Colour Lovers - which looks at the different palettes of colours used by different web sites and magazines. It's good for identifying different colours that work together and combinations that are currently 'trendy'.

I found Colour Lovers via the excellent Modern Life, which is also a great source of design advice. Stuart Brown, the guy behind the site, is very clued up but also amusingly sarcastic about current web design trends. He has a great guide to currently popular Web 2.0 typefaces and a useful 'web typography cheat sheet'. He also written some good basic advice on developing effective web designs and some excellent posts about popular Web 2.0 colours and the way he uses colour on his site. His guide to writing good headlines online is very witty but also very useful. Have a look round the site and see what else you can find.

Today's session

Today we're going to be doing a variety of things. I've got some more Fireworks tutorials for you to try - covering working with layers, text and creating buttons. We've done the latter before but there is an easier and quicker way to create buttons and navigation elements than the first way I showed you.

I've put the files you need to do the tutorials in an Online Journalism 2 sub-folder, in the Online folder on the Journalism shared area. If you get all of the tutorials done, you should have an example home page completed by the end of today. Save that somewhere and we can use in next week, when we'll be looking in more detail at web layout - specifically tables vs layers.

Aside from Fireworks, we're going to review where we're at with the email interviews. If you have received a reply you need to start working with your material. Think about the writing guidelines and advice we looked at last week and start laying out your text in something like Word. Start gathering and creating the assets and copy you'll need for your layouts. Research useful or relevant links, gather visuals, write a blurb/intro, think about whether you need to cut the material.

I'm also going to try to find time to talk to each of you invidually about your site plans - the idea is to make sure you've done the necessary development work so you can start creating in the next week or two.