I’m really glad that after months of research, I landed at Perpetual Education to begin my web design journey. Perpetual Education’s Design for The Web is an online program that teaches the entire web design and development process from idea to completion. During the last three weeks we have immersed ourselves in HTML. It’s been really exciting learning how to utilize different elements, navigating FTPs, implementing CSS style codes, adding rich sharing meta data to pages, diving into Affinity, and understanding file paths. This week we learned about iFrames / in-page anchor links, and I’m looking forward to utilizing them in projects moving forward. It’s been busy, but immensely rewarding!
For our first challenge I created a 3 page site to test my understanding of file paths. For content and inspiration, I used an old essay on family archivists. The challenge instilled the importance of file paths and using best practices when organizing files. I also used new style elements like a marquee of old family photos on the homepage and a list of scholars with the details disclosure element on the second page to display their thoughts on archiving without taking up too much space on the page.
Graphic design has been something I’ve been eager to dive into and Affinity is the design software we’re working on. So far we’ve created designs with gradients, made graphics for sharing metadata, and we’re familiarizing ourselves with the pen tool. To gain more practice creating graphics we’ve started a 30 day challenge to create something everyday for a month. For a theme, I’m going to make runyankole (Ugandan dialect) alphabet cards for my new godson that represent aspects of Banyankole culture. Like I mentioned in my first article, I want to make designs that honor identities that are not widely celebrated or acknowledged. This project could grow into something more and I’m excited to explore that!
Looking forward to gaining more skills :)