I’ve spent the past several days reading and mulling over the current class assignment: various restoration and other tricks with photos. I’ve taken examples from the Eismann book (Photoshop: Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann), and I’ve played around with several photos. I think I’ve gotten the hang of cleaning up images, but I have to admit I don’t like hand-coloring. Maybe I need more practice to get better at it, but I think the results of my efforts don’t show how much thought and effort I really put into hand-coloring. The results are poor.

My preliminary sketch for my image assignment website.

Thankfully, I had a stroke of inspiration when it came to the web design for this project page. Since I’m employed by the wonderful Center for History and New Media as a web designer, I feel utterly obligated to make a 200% effort on these design bits—that’s what I’m in the class for, right? To strive for better design? Well, I thought I would share with you part of my design process. I always start with a sketch, and this time I wanted to do something with a bit of a retro feel. No doubt inspired by the recent readings on such desgin (particularly by Cameron Moll), but also by the retro nature of my subject matter. These are, afterall, OLD photos. Some older than others, but hopefully my design can tie them all together with a fun, but still simple and elegant look.

I’m currently plugging away at it. I had to figure out a php thing I’d been trying to figure out for weeks, so can I have dynamically generated pages. Fortunately, with a stroke of luck a well-worded Google search turned up the perfect tutorial (and a pretty cool site: inobscuro.com). I’ve also been trying to create some cool artwork to go along with the page, and I’m trying to make sure it’s all coded correctly. Much work left to do…

Reading through some of the other class postings, I’m not the only one with a dislike of colorization and some difficulty with Photoshop (see Steven’s “De-Constructing History 2.0″). Discussing her process of image editing, Misha’s post “A bit of gray here and there” made me want to go back and do more…just as soon as I find the time.

I must confess I am short on time this week. My husband is back briefly on R&R from Iraq, and I selfishly want to spend ALL of my time with him. I know that in a few days’ time, when he is gone, I will mull over and work through these techniques we’ve read about this week— it usually takes me working on a project before such tools reveal their usefulness. I can read about a technique, but until I am working on a project and encounter a design issue (ie. how to achieve “x”), I cannot truly internalize the method. But it’s during one of these “design issues” that I have an a-ha! moment and remember a tool I’ve come across, find that book or web site, re-read the tutorial or example, and make brilliant progress in my work. Thankfully, we have spring break next week, when I can spend some extra time with these books and techniques and re-visit past and current projects with new ideas in mind. I do already have one idea, which I noted on Mark’s blog, that I can use the “wicked worn” look to great effect on my genealogy site, which one day will be much more than a sample page for our type assignment.

I love the technique David Shea discusses in his “Photographic Palettes.” In particular, the box-drawing: drawing a box in the color you want to use and adding on top smaller white and black boxes of varying opacities to generate a color palette. I have come across the concept of choosing color from a photograph, and though I haven’t done it yet, now that I’ve seen a rather cool demonstration of it, I will have to try it soon. I’ve come across a few things recently that also help with color strategy —namely Eric Meyer’s Color Blender, which is great for finding shades of a color or colors to create a coherent color theme for your website. I am also reading The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag and in Chapter 2, “Design,” in the section called “Springtime,” the authors discuss “Using Color to Evoke Emotion” and mention a few other useful tips. My favorite, which is similar to the one Dave Shea mentions in his “24 Ways” article, is creating a color strip in Photoshop. Much like a paint swatch card, you can create boxes of color and shades of color to see how they complement one another. The advantage of this method is that once you find a pleasing palette, you can not only save it as something that you can easily refer back to, you can also easily select the RGB/Hex value in the swatch and paste it into your CSS. [Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag, The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2005, p.64.]

Danilo Black USA website—an example of minimal color in website design. At Chuck Green’s Ideabook article on Color Strategy, he discusses four strategies for color selection in web design:

1. Using subdued colors to highlight the main focus of a website: the product or service, as at the New York Times, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.
2. Color-coding sections of a website to create continuity and clarity of your message throughout your site.
3. Minimize number of colors: while I really, really like the website in his first example in this section (Danilo Black USA), the site, and maybe it’s out of date, seems to have no content. There are only a couple of links and I can’t figure out what the point of the site is. Visually, though, it is very appealing.
4. Deconstruct exemplars: find sites you like and pull out the colors they use and figure out how they use them, then apply this to your own site.

Now, after being obsessed with design and seeing design elements and font styles everywhere, I’m sure I’ll notice color and color schemes…

After looking around at a few of the class’s blogs, I commented on Lee Ann’s blog about, basically, the learning curve and expectations with regard to this design stuff. I am continuing a thread I started when I posted about “The Polyglot Manifesto,” saying that we can’t all be great at everything. Now, I don’t want to sound negative or like I have no personal ambition, but I do believe it is rare to find people who excel at -everything- they do. I guess I’m trying to be encouraging to myself and others in saying that it’s okay to get just the basics and to plod away at this doing the best you can. Sure, you push yourself and challenge yourself, but I don’t think you should punish yourself if you aren’t as competent as Dave Shea after six months of practicing CSS web design.

I also added on James’s blog that web design is indeed hard work and time-consuming. It seems similar to writing and editing a paper, you can edit and re-edit and edit some more and refine and refine until you get your final product just the way you want it. That’s why I like my job: I get to constantly challenge myself to create something new or to achieve something specific with my design. Plus, there’s always some new CSS technique…

I had to leave a comment on Jenny’s blog after receiving a comment from her and reading her latest posting. I got to thinking about why we’re all doing this…or, rather, why the real historians in the class are doing this. And I think one main reason is that presentation matters. Contrary to what I know some of you think (Ken, I’m largely referring to you and the discussion we had, which I think trailed over into class and you talked about in your blog entry “Grey Suits and Greening”), unless your opinions have changed as they may well have, presentation matters. Now, I know you have good reasons for believing that image isn’t everything, and you’re right, but that’s taking it too far —image isn’t everything and presentation matters. You don’t have to have the world’s most beautifully designed website to have an impact on your audience, but looking like you care can go a long way. Sorry, don’t mean to beat a dead horse…but I’m convinced there’s a reason why we all want to do well with this type assignment, and I don’t think it’s just for a good grade.

This week, I’ve become obsessed with design. I feel this is my weak area when it comes to web design–the creativity, the artistic sense, the simple beauty. Instead, I’ve seen myself as a good coder, a quick learner, a problem solver. I am probably just something of a perfectionist and have standards so high that I’ll never meet them (but that’s another issue).

All this is to say that “design” is first among my many top priorities these days. I want to learn how to use color, type, whitespace, and artwork for maximum benefit in a standards-compliant website. I don’t want my websites to look overdone, I like things clean and simple, but I don’t want them to look plain and simple.

So, as I’ve been going about my life in the past week, I’ve started to see design everywhere. Buildings that look like good frames for a webpage. Shapes that inspire background or header images. And, of course, fonts. I thought I would post here a few of the websites I’ve noticed in the past week that I really like. We always take inspiration from others’ work, and looking at my favorites is one of the first places I turn when I start a new project. I note their colors, their code sometimes, their artwork. I note what I like and what I don’t like.

Erskine Design: Clean, elegant, and a little bit playful.

Hicks Design Creative, artistic, and still simple.

NDesign: Graphic/web designer Nick La’s portfolio really showcases his artistic ability and serves as a great spot for web inspiration.

OPM: Finally, the Office of Personnel Management updated its site with excellent, clean design.

Hopefully, you will find them (and the sites they link to) inspiring, too.

Manan Ahmed’s “The Polyglot Manifesto” certainly raised many issues: a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Humanities, the possible contradiction-in-terms of “a public scholar,” and telegenic charm versus ivory tower retreat. Despite the controversy inherent in these issues, Ahmed’s final point —that the humanities, historians in particular, should become publicly engaged through the digital world—should be anything but.

Frankly, I don’t understand how one person can master his chosen historical field (plus a couple of minor fields), a few foreign languages necessary to do exceptional archival research, and learn to create digital archives —actually, I’m sure there are many exceptionally bright people who are capable, but certainly not all scholars are so gifted. It makes me think that, with the exception of the 10 people in the world who are capable of doing all of this, scholars will spread themselves too thin to be effective in their primary fields. We can’t all do everything. If, for example, you are an expert in colonial American history and you have a profound understanding in American constitutional law and political philosophy, how can you also master French, Spanish, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript? Can you really be a master of it all?

But, I digress. I don’t think this is Ahmed’s point. I do wholeheartedly agree that the digital arena is an excellent place for historians, and all scholars in the humanities for that matter, to engage the public. Ahmed raises three main questions: “Who am I, as a scholar? What is my role within my community? What are my responsibilities to the public?” In his writing, there seems to be a hunger for being more than a scholar, more than a teacher. He cites examples of some who have gone beyond the halls of academia to the public realm, primarily through television. This kind of public involvement, to Ahmed, seems almost like conduct unbecoming a scholar—with its “mass-communication demanded sound-bites” and “rhetoric.” To his goal of being a “socially-engaged scholar,” he argues that the digital world is the place where this goal can be met. While I agree, and I’m sure to garner some flak from my colleagues, I have to point out that as a professor of the humanities, you have a ready-made connection to public society: your students. Isn’t this one of the reasons many people choose become professors, to teach? Not only are there your students, there are your writings, your publications, which presumably is one of the reasons why publications are generally required for tenure —because this is how you contribute and engage the public in your chosen field. Not that one shouldn’t strive to reach beyond these two forms of public communication, but don’t forget that they are there. The way I see it, the Internet, especially the “Web 2.0 World,” is an extension of these two realms. Historians, for example, can better reach their students this way, and reach more students; they can reach more of the general public as well. It is really another form of publication that allows new and different forms of interaction, especially with regard to visual communication.

On Jenny Reeder’s blog, I raise the question of whether the notion of historian as interpreter claims too much. It does strike me as rather pretentious, but I know from my own research that this is what we strive to do. Any thoughts?

This week’s reading made me want to get up and yell about how much I love footnotes, especially after reading Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?” I cannot think of how many times I’ve read some history book, full of references, and I have been torn between whether I should flip to read the endnote (lost somewhere at the end of the book, as I’ve never actually been smart enough to maintain a bookmark in that section) or to keep reading. Many times, I’ve been utterly disappointed after struggling to find that nugget of information and discovering (1) that it was only a variation on an “ibid” citation, which I would then have to read backwards in the footnotes to find the complete reference, or (2) that it was just a simple unannotated source reference. I love when historians comment on their sources. I feel I’ve learned so much this way. After reflecting on all the readings, and commenting on Steven’s lovely NOLA-themed blog (in “The Lost Art of Footnoting,” this is why some variation of the pop-up/lightbox would be my choice. Maybe I would even add a link to a nicely formatted “endnote” page (even though I don’t like endnotes), strictly for people to print out and use on its own. Otherwise, the pop-up allows you to quickly see if the information in the note is something you’re interested in. If it is, you can read on; if not, you can move your mouse and continue with the main text.

About the argument as to whether the footnote should be superscripted and why it should look like print, I would say that why shouldn’t it look like print? In the case of history, it seems that we’re mostly publishing items on the Internet that are also published in print (in some form or another). I agree that the Web is a new format and should explore new presentation methods, but as pointed out on Piggin.Net, there are certain visual cues that presentation provides, and to stray too far from traditional presentation methods could risk comprehension of your final product, whatever it may be.

For Part 1 of our assignment this week, I took an example from McFly at Project Seven and changed the xhtml and css, added header title and background images, and produced 3 linked pages that should all be valid xhtml and css (though I could not get the image for the css one…). I was concentrating on keeping it simple, sticking to a rather monochromatic color scheme, with just a couple of images to spruce it up. I created three pages instead of my original single page so that I could avoid the scrolling and internal page links.

For Part 2, creating a portfolio, I spent quite a bit of time redesigning my site this week, and I wanted the portfolio to fit into my overall design. So, I created a new page in WordPress and added some special styling (see the commented section about a third to halfway down called “Clio2 Portfolio Styles”) to the main content of the page. As time goes on, each box will have a thumbnail image (as the first does) as well as a brief description of that assignment.

I also decided to add back in an image for the site logo.