Gite d'étape (alberge, Golinhac, Aveyron, Occitanie, 1999.

Balisage du GR 65 ‎⁨près de Conques-en-Rouergue⁩, ⁨Occitanie, 1999.

A Pilgrim’s Way in Conques, The Aveyron

The mid-afternoon autumnal sun was shining down on St. Foy Abbey, Conques, in the Aveyron, France, from our high viewpoint, it appeared bathed in golden light. The imposing abbey stood proud in the centre of the small village, the triple spires towering over the tiled roofs, and narrow, cobbled side streets. The cobbles worn smooth, and flat by the footfalls of many thousands of weary pilgrims…

http://dresdencodak.com/ 

Artist Aaron Diaz brings us Dresden Codak (as well as a pretty varied collection of other comics over the last decade, it seems). Ultimately I love his site, but there are a few things I would do differently. What I'll include in a brief summary of the website's many strengths is his attention to aesthetic and the "brand" of his comic. If you even look at just the first one, you can see the consistency between the navigational buttons, the landing page's header logo and the various graphical <div>s (regardless of whether or not that's how he's actually set up the html). I love that the icons for the navigation are little illustrations; his comic has always appealed to those who're interested in that epic fantasy world, and they capture a bit of that mystique perfectly. The archive page is phenomenal too, exactly what I think someone in his position should be doing.

That being said, there are a few things about his overall site that bother me. I'm sure there may be reasons for these discrepancies, but it's jarring to navigate to either his blog or the store. Both lead you two external pages (which is fine) but one is Topatoco, which is a bold, ugly red webpage that ruins the great ambiance he established with his. Even if I wanted to buy something I close the window, just to be rid of the red. The artist blog webpage is fine too but with that he certainly has more control over its aesthetic, so I'd almost prefer he include some aspects of his homepage's bells and whistles to make it all feel like more of a package.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/

SMBC has always impressed me with how it can look fine, but still come across as cheap or poorly done. It gives the impression of a lack of quality, but that also may be Zach's (the artist) preference, as his comic has always had a sort of rough edge to it. (one glance at my webcomic and you'll see my aesthetic sensibilities). I love the navigation for his comics. With the "back" "random" and "next" assigned buttons, you can with one hand skip through hours of your life, enjoying non-sequential and often non-sequitur jokes and puns. As someone who spent a childhood eating cereal over the sunday morning newspaper and later in front of my computer browsing web comics, single-handed browsing his greatly appreciated.

Zach runs into the same issue I have with a few other webcomics. His archive page is a mess. I understand doing a daily comic that it must be a daunting task-- that is, making it relatively searchable. It's been eleven years now, and as far as I'm aware, he's never set up a system of tags or metadata organization. I can find specific comics I remember from years back, but only because it's become a wildly popular comic and there're shirts and comics and tributes and the ones that I love many people loved, so that's fine, but it's not something someone should have as an assumption while designing a webpage.

http://xkcd.com/

XKCD is one of the sites that does a great deal with very little. Both in content and on the site, he sometimes runs into some issues of clutter (again, I tend to prefer spacious and simple graphics) but ultimately it's all pretty straightforward in execution, and the gold of his comic lies in the ideas he communicates via his often stick-figure sketches.

His archive navigation also bothers me a little. I appreciate that there's a mouse-over date viewing option, which reduces clutter and is a nice way of estimating which comic you're looking for, or where you'd like to start reading. That being said, a single column center-aligned is kinda crummy, and I maintain that the people who're reading webcomics are inherently visual people, and would work much better with little thumbnails than lists.

  Honorable shout-out to 

http://www.asofterworld.com/

Monday May Design design comp

What is "Grid Theory" and why is it important to web design?

Grid theory is a means of breaking up the space of a webpage into columns and rows to aid in getting the basic organization of content under control. Well-placed elements do a lot for a webpage, and no matter how good your material is, if it's placed in an unintentionally asymmetrical fashion or if it's so symmetrical that it's stale, you can kill the appeal of your site.

Even worse, without any grid established (even informally), materials on your page can seem lost and floating, and ultimately unpleasant to look at.

In addition to "balance," what are the other design principles important to Web design?

Additional principles are Unity (and proximity in relation to how close objects register as a unified object, and repetition in how it brings together a layout), and Emphasis with its sub-principles, Placement, Continuance, Isolation, Contrast and Proportion. 

What are the "Bread and Butter Layouts" in web design?

"Bread and Butter Layouts", beyond referencing food for which I'm now desperately hungry, refers to some oft-found layouts with: a left navigational column and a large central column, or a right navigational column and a large central column, or the three-column layout, which has a large central column with narrow columns on either side.