Monday, November 28, 2011

April Greiman Summary

 April Greiman is a contemporary designer who was recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman studied graphic design at Kansas City Art Institute then earned her Master’s degree from Basel School of Design in Switzerland. During her early years as a designer Greiman was inspired by the International style, and later became a fan of the New Wave style. Other designers that were popular during the same time as Greiman generally avoided computers and digitalization since they were challenging. However, April Greiman embraced the pixilation and other error that often occurred in digital art and exploited them. Aside from being a designer herself, Greiman has also taught at many different art schools including Academy of Art University, Woodward University, The Southern California Institute of the Arts. April Greiman used a Macintosh computer for the majority of her work and won the Grand Prize in Mac World’s First Macintosh Masters in Art competition. April also won the American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal for lifetime achievement, and was awarded a total of six honorary doctorates. Lastly, Greiman has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

Here is a quick sketch of the layout of my webpage for April Greiman.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

CSS Basics Chapters 1-4

Chapters 1-4 on cssbasics.com covered topics such as the basics of CSS, CSS syntax, CSS classes, and CSS IDs. The first chapter discusses the difference between CSS and HTML along with the different methods of incorporating CSS into HTML code. While HTML is the content, CSS is the style. CSS allows you to separate website content from the style. There are different methods as to how you can include CSS into your HTML code: internally, externally, or embedded. Out of these three methods, embedded CSS is the most commonly used. In Chapter 2 CSS Syntax is discussed. Syntax consists of a selector, a property, and a value. It is important to note that each selector can have multiple properties, each property within a selector can have independent values. Also, properties and values are separated with a colon, values are separated by a comma, and properties are separated with a semi colon. Lastly, Chapters 3 and 4 discuss CSS classes and ID's. Class selectors allow you to style items within the same HTML element differently, while CSS ID's can be used to style the layout elements of a page that will only be needed once. Also, it is important to remember that once a specific ID has been declared, it cannot be used again within the same HTML file.