Arranged Delirium

It’s not enough to practice web development - you also need to keep up with the changing elements of design and the trends in the field. I read about web design every day, and I find myself frequently heading back to a couple of valuable resources:

A List Apart - I’ve been reading this one for years. Its a regular column referencing current issues in web development and it also has a number of incredibly useful and well written tutorials if you are just learning how to code. Its been around and relevant for years. Interestingly enough there is a recent article regarding the HTML 5 vs. Flash debate I’ve been discussing recently…

Smashing Magazine - This site covers a broader range of topics, but does a good job of representing a diverse range of interests. More recently, they have covered topics of interest including writing an effective cover letter and they’ve also provided a showcase of academic web sites.

Perhaps I should add to the list. There are a number of valuable sites regularly covering web design. Which one do you find most useful?

Now that students in New Media actually know a little something about Photoshop, you might also want to learn how to use brushes to increase the complexity of your work without doing everything manually. There are numerous sites where you can get brushes to download and incorporate into your work - but I like the iDesign brushes site because it also has a number of valuable tutorials accessible via the tabs at the top right.

As students in web design work with CSS for basic formatting, this list of common fonts for Windows and Mac should come in handy. You are always best served by using fonts common to both platforms…

In web development I’ve been explaining the differences between HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS - along with what to use, etc. Of course the future question will be when to implement HTML 5. Here’s some super-basic information about it. The question of whether to use HTML 5 though is one these students will have to answer in a few years, once the specs are finalized and support is more broad-based…

As I continue to reflect on our computer game course from last month, I’ve also continued to work a bit with GameSalad a tool designed to help you develop iPhone games, without taking the time to program them exclusively with Objective-C. Conveniently, Creative Mac has recently published a short review.

In some ways, it similar to AppMakr and it’s ilk of programming assistants, but GameSalad is much more robust. Most of the tools like AppMakr, simply coalesce RSS feeds into one convenient tool and let you change up some text and add some images. I could easily make a SamFee app for the iPhone with AppMakr, but then again, why? GameSalad on the other hand, would actually let me make a decent game. Now, if I only had a creative idea…