Group Project
Summary
In collaboration with a group of your peers, you will
develop a Web site about one aspect of Web design.
Collaborative ethics
Each group member is responsible both for contributing
his/her fair share to the group's work and for enabling and encouraging his/her
colleagues to contribute their fair share. At the end of this assignment,
each group member will confidentially evaluate his/her own work and the work of
his/her group colleagues. To support your evaluation, keep a record of your own
work and the work of your group colleagues.
Purpose
Your group's objective is to create an educational and instructional Web site about one of the following topics of Web
design:
1.
Site
Architecture and Navigation
2.
Screen
Layout
3.
Writing
and Typography
4.
Color
5.
Graphics
Audience
In our scenario for this assignment, your audience is OGHS
students of courses like Advanced Web Page Construction, who receive a quick-and-dirty
lesson in the bare mechanics of putting up a simple Web page, but no real
understanding of the mechanics and, more importantly, no understanding of the
principles of effective, usable design. Your group's site will be linked from
the course page, where students
would thereby access it along with the other Web design sites. Also, assume
that students have already learned the general basics of HTML, and hence need
be instructed only in those aspects of HTML that are specific to your Web design
topic.
Content
You Web site should meaningfully cover each of these three
dimensions of your Web design topic:
Principles of Web design and communication in your group's chosen
topic.
Illustrations of these principles through examples of real Web pages
that do or do not exemplify these principles in practice.
Applications of these principles in how-to technical practice
(how to use HTML/Adobe GoLive 6.0 and Photoshop to apply these principles).
Resources for Web design principles
The most challenging dimension of your topic is the Web
design principles
. Start your research by examining some
of the following resources on general Web design principles:
Usable Web , with over 1000 links about Web
usability.
Web
Style Guide, 2nd ed. ,
the best-known on-line manual about principles of Web design, originally
published as the Yale Style Manual by the Yale
Center for Advanced Instructional Media.
Research-Based
Web Design and Usability Guidelines , which, as the title suggests, draws on empirical
research for its guidelines, and which is part of the Usability.gov site by the National Cancer
Institute
useit.com , by Jakob Nielsen, the most
famous and controversial Web usability expert, most of whose recommendations
are published in his Web usability books and bi-weekly Alertbox
newsletter
optimal web design , a summary of Web design research
drawing on about 100 research studies ,
maintained by the Software Usability Research Lab of the Department of
Psychology at Wichita State University, which also publishes the Usability News newsletter, primarily about Web design
Ease of Use Design
, part of IBM's
usability site
If you would like more information about your specific Web
design topic, ask me to recommend further sources.
Web examples
To find examples of real Web pages that do or do not
exemplify your Web design principles, decide early on in your project which of your
design principles can be best illustrated with visual examples and then keep
alert as you regularly surf the Web. Some sites specialize in collecting
examples of poor Web design: