I really appreciate, that my academy is remaking the website, anyways, there is room for improvement in following areas:

1. design consistency
2. semantics
3. readability

Design Consistency:

In the menu on the left, there are rounded boxes and dropshadows, nowhere else, the background image varies for widget boxes on the right and the overall background. The style of the icons (compare top right to social media) and also the headlines to the right vary a lot. Some of them are type, some are images.

Semantics:

The whole left main navigation is one picture. It is not optimizeable for search engines and uses an image map. No HTML5 elements are used at all, which would also improve machine readability. Headlines are not in <h1> to <h6> tags.

Readabilty:

The font for the headlines is very thick and not easy to read, especially not when it gets below 30px. In the lower corner there is even some “webfont” logo, I recommend checking out fontsquirrel.com. The background image is very noisy and too intense for good readability.

Conclusion:

I’m not mad about that my portfolio is not featured, I just point out the things that really struck me. I hope my critique is perceived in the respectful way it is meant to be.

The visit at Lego was really interesting and informative. We heard about the history, were given an insight how Lego is trying to expand and keep up with new media and heard about the web development team. Plus we got to play with the Lego bricks! Visiting the machinery that build toys of my childhood was also a huge moment, to see the degree of automisation and look at the small figures that were brought alive by my phantasies these years ago.

Okay, here you go, photos: (notice the Lego logo out of small Lego figures )

The presentations were of very mixed quality. Most firms were well prepared, some minor glitches occured. Some set very strict guidelines and gave us a concept that made us all howl to the gods of good design and beg for burning sulfur and lightning.

There was not even time for evaluating the different objectives, because the application lists were up all the time and limited, so some projects were filled up almost immediatly. When we argued, that we couldn’t even listen to all companies and consider we got a plain: “Yes, you can.”, from one of teachers. We argued: “But what about $project_X?” and got: “Oh you can’t take that.”. We were very puzzled by that.
One of the customers changed the deadline of a sub-task to a week before deadling (which is a lot, considering we were given 14 days) and that is just not a very nice treatment of people who are trying to deliver some results that are worth being in their portfolios.
Should we get used to incoherent informations from customers right away?
Apart from the changing demands and information it’s been a good real life project so far though, but there’s always room for improvement

As mentioned before I’m studying at NoMA and recently one of my teachers literally bragged about, that they could see, who accesses which documents on our online ressource for material: fronter.com.

I see this as a violation of my privacy, because I just could have copied documents from another student and it is really nobodies business when I download which document. I refuse to use the service until this catastrophic state is removed. I was not informed about this, when I signed up for the service, which is an abuse of my trust.

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Monday and Tuesday we had some great lessons with our external teacher Jeremy Keith from clear left. He stripped the lessons down to the changes in elements and semantics of the web and specifically HTML5.

We did some exercises on document outlines and how <section> and <hgroup> influence them. Also the theories behind HTML5 as a living standard (as proposed by the whatWG and HTML5 as a standard as formerly shaped by the w3c were discussed. We had a complete workshop how to use HTML5 with its new semantics right now and how to provide complete backward compability.

I’ll get into that in another post, because my time-shedule is a little tight right now.

Thank you very much Jeremy for clarifying and also taking a look at our portfolios for improvement!