convert

I'm getting a little sentimental writing this but subconsciously, I've grown attached to this blog. I'm an engineering major but I surprise myself every time I realize how much I love English and the arts. It's easy, in the world and society we live in today, to be polarized into being either a person of math and science or a person of English and humanities. I mean, heck, I'm at Georgia Tech. You're either an engineering major or something else.

All joking aside though, I truly appreciated and enjoyed English I. When I first heard about the topic of our class, I spoke a little french because I thought I hated art. But what do ya know, art is actually enlightening and inspirational. And what do I love? Being enlightened and inspired. Going back to the first piece we read in class and the title of my blog, I'm glad that now, art objects at my ignorance in art objects and I'm proud to say I am no longer an art-hater.

Atlanta Art 101

Atlanta Art 101: A Georgia Tech Student's Guide to the Atlanta Art Scene in 7 Days.
Are you a Georgia Tech student? Do you want to explore Atlanta? Do you have limited time and resources (meaning are you swamped with tests and homework and dead broke)? Then this is the guide for you.

The above is what I was thinking when I came up with the theme of our website. This last project is no longer a "school assignment" but we're creating a real product that will be useful to a real audience- us.

Here's a screen shot of the homepage. I know, no pictures or moving graphics but it's made to resemble a course description page you might find online when searching for classes to sign up for. And of course, an edited SGA course critique screen shot that all of us fervently check before registering.

And zooming up on a bit of my corny humor,

weebly

My group and I have decided to use Weebly instead of Dreamweaver. I am a little sad because there's less designing involved in Weebly but with the time constraint, Weebly will help us more efficiently. It was actually voted #4 by TIME magazine for the 50 best websites in 2007. It's a widget-based website so it's really easy to use. You pretty much click and drag then edit. It's also convenient because more than one person can be logged into the account which allows all of our group members to edit at the same time. Dr.Bremm mentioned the website in class but after actually having used Weebly, I definitely recommend it.

cool stuff

Click here to see 20 websites with really cool layouts. If you look at the worst websites in my previous entry and then compare those to the ones compiled in this blog, you'll notice that appearance is important. You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can definitely judge a website by it's layout. That was really corny but it's true. In a way, with this project, we're given a blank canvas with our mouse and keyboard acting as paintbrushes. That was also corny but this website is going to test our artistic skills way more than our previous two projects. Thank God for Dreamweaver is all I have to say.

design with common sense

worst websites of 2010

When it comes to websites, the content is important but honestly, it's about the visual appeal. You could have the most useful information but if it's arranged in a way that irritates the readers, you've lost your reader at the first click. With that said, I think the simpler the better. I really don't understand people who create websites that have hard to read text, in terms of color, background, and size, that is. Why in the world would you present information that is unreadable? It might as well be a blank page then... Creativity should be explored but within the realms of basic common sense.

facebook generation

We have now begun the last and final project for english1101, the Atlanta Art Guide and I guess as a pre-planning tool, I want to jot a few notes down and hopefully it'll help not just me but anybody reading.

So I think interaction is going to be HUGE. By interaction, I mean the type of interaction we have with facebook everyday when we "like" stuff or comment on walls or join various groups. I know we're creating an art guide but thinking about the audience of this project which would be the Georgia Tech community, and more specifically- us, college students, if my group and I could weave in interaction tools like the ones on facebook, our website would take a familiar shape for the intended audience enticing them to visit the site. I hate to admit I'm part of the facebook generation but I am and aside from other great things that facebook offers, interaction is definitely one of them, making it the most visited site for me and probably all of you.

museum experience part 2

I can add my trip to the High with my group members today to my list of museum experiences and one that I enjoyed. Going to the museum with fellow peers definitely made the trip a pleasant experience because as I mentioned before, I feel extremely out of place in art museums, like I shouldn't be there. But today, I had a purpose for being there and knowing there were others in the same boat assured me I didn't just stroll into a museum by accident.

The Titian exhibit, for those of you who visited already, are paintings and drawings from the mid 1500's that includes mostly religious human subjects. This was vastly different from where I spent most of my time during my previous trip to the High which was on the 3rd floor looking at modern and contemporary art. Christina already beat me to blogging about our adventure today but one big difference I too noticed right away was the color of the wall: Titian exhibit- red, contemporary permanent collection- white. This popular museum trend of "white spaces" is something I accepted as the norm for museums because that's pretty much all I've been exposed to in my lifetime experience of museums. So the red today was different. In retrospect, if Titian's Diana paintings were displayed on white walls, it wouldn't have worked out as well as it did with the red walls. Why? Because his subjects are fair skinned and light so there's a definite contrast that exists between the color of the subjects and the color of the wall that garners my attention as a spectator. I like to believe that is a good thing.

red wall