“To come up with a good design is to…try” -Fabio Lazaris

Fabio is a web designer from Brazil. He owns Abduzeedo it is a website for graphic design inspiration and tutorial for Photoshop. He said that there is three things that affects his workflow (1) necessity,(2) challenge and (3) business.

Necessity because  he needs to know what to do and who he is doing it for, challenge because he thinks of how to make it better and business because even if he has personal feelings toward a project he will try to separate it his business.

I think that how he deals with his workflow is a good thing to consider for me, because for work to be initialized I should first know who the work is for and what the work is, so that I can go into it prepared, then the real challenge comes in because I would think on how to make the output better and then never let my feelings cloud my judgment.

We are influenced by a lot of things especially the things that we see. First impressions are important. Approach new users like it’s a date and existing users like it’s a marriage. These are some of the opening statement of the speaker.

He is saying if you bore your user they won’t come back but if you put so much into it like pop-up’s that come out of nowhere the user might jump right out of the site and never come back. It is important to keep it subtle but at the same time get your message across the internet to your user because if they don’t understand the content of your website they will go to other websites to look for the information they need.

This is another session in Photoshop and how to enhance the overall UI design of a website and the experience of the user when visiting a website by looking into the layout of the website using grids and making the main part or topic of the website stand out. The layout of a website is important because it stands as a guide for the user like where do I start reading? What is next? Where do I stop?  Etc. If the user doesn’t have a clue on where to start then they might leave the site and go to another. The user should be able to navigate around the site and never get lost or bombarded with too much information they should be able to digest the info before proceeding to another part of the website.

Before when you say ‘click’ it is the sound of a camera taking a snap shot and when you say ‘button’ it is the thing that holds a polo shirt together so when the idea of clicking a button in an application was brought up it was hard to imagine. I remember going to school and being taught how to click, double click and even right click. Today it is not needed anymore because of the need of computer in our daily life made the younger generation learn it even if they are not yet in school. So yes web design has evolved throughout the years because it is safer to assume that a user knows how to click and can perceive what a website is for unlike before.

The speaker talks about jQuery because it’s designer friendly, it needs little effort to understand the code syntax and it’s like choosing a guitar because there are a lot of information out there about jQuery. jQuery is a good tool because it is supported by all browsers and simplifies a HTML and CSS codes. And the most important of all it adds a little animation to a website because it enables a page to have the illusion of movement. Unlike CSS which handles the design part of the website. And newer versions are available when needed to adapt at the demands of those who make websites.

Marketing for Expression Engine which uses jquery and php, it designs and updates a website instantly. It is for people who want to update their websites but without the hassle of the coding part because let us be honest maintaining a website is time consuming and would require knowledge on coding. It simplifies the coding part by storing parts of a traditional HTML file into global variables where it can be used all throughout the website. This is handy because you don’t need to have long codes that say basically the same thing. It’s simplicity makes it easier for people to design, code and publish their websites.

The speaker demonstrated some ways on how to create effects like splats, spray and drip. And how to imitate it as a brush in Photoshop, and then use it as effects in designs. He also advised that when doing these effects photo paper should be used because it looks much neater when scanned.

For me using Photoshop is another technique that should be learned, because Photoshop is a great tool for enhancing the user-interface design of a website.  When building websites it should also be pleasing to the eyes of the user so that they would have another reason to come back to the website. Because a website should not only be “good looking” or has great functionalities but it should be a balance of both.