Possible Usable Tech Tools

Looking a the Yahoo YUI tools there were a couple of things like the drag and drop script that could be interesting. It allows the user ability to grab a div and move it freely. This could be used in a section of the site where we have a bunch of items that students/parents could arrange. Another application that hit my eye allowed the ability to pull weather from Yahoo! This could be cool to have a weather tracker on the site so people can see how cold Big Rapids can get and if it is in their interest to drive up for a look-see. Curvy-corners is a really interesting feature that could be used really cohesively with the Javascript that I looked at from the Yahoo site. The use of interesting Javascript could very well be the way that we use as little Flash as possible…………  

Helvetica

Me messing with type a bit this is my spin after watching the Helvetica movie.The use of creative typography is a very hard development because of the limited ability of choose you have when creating type. We need to get around the use of too much use of images in order to incorporate the type we want to use. The incorporation of all the things that we learn in typography are going to help us push user ability to navigate the site. I think that it is also a very good idea that we stay away from using flash to incorporate any text boxing that are on angles. The users we are targeting, in my opition, are there for facts laid out in way that it is easy to find what they want.   

Khoi Vinh: Web Design

The over all emphasis on his speech was to inform designers and the general public about the ever evolving implement of web design. First he talked about how web design and print design are developed to tell a story through communicating with visuals and type. Further more he added the fact that print design gives the user basically no control over how the material is presented. Web design on the other hand has so many elements that web browsers allow the users to do with the presentation of information, such as text resizing, links that take the view off of the side and interfere with the flow of material, and many other chooses. It was nice to see a good comparison like that but it seems to me that he really had a huge bias toward the use of web design. In my opinion we have allow ourselves to equally look at both web and prints and know that there are weaknesses and strength attributed to both. I do agree however, the fact that when the information is translated from print to web design it allows for more user interaction by the ability to comment on virtually any web “conversation”.Bringing up the fact that web design is virtually a conversation, opposed to a speech, was a very good point. Overall Khio Vinh brought up good points on was we expect from designers vs. most of the web 2.0 world, such as Myspace, is completely night and day. Design is the ability to create a communication mecca that pulls users in and effectively tells users a story. After hearing what he had to say about Myspace it makes me want to take a look at my Myspace and completely revamp it and put a designers touch on it. ( I just watched Helvetica the movie a couple of days ago and love that he used it in his powerpoint very concrete to the significance of what the movie talked about.)