Layout and composition

This first chapter in the Beautiful Web Design book was a good summary of everything we've learned so far in the class: principles of usability, knowing your audience, starting your design on paper, and my favorite phrase (content is king). I found it helpful to see grids and the rule of thirds, which I know from photography, applied to web design. Actually, I was familiar with a lot of the items discussed in this chapter because of the photography classes I've taken: symmetry, weight, isolation, etc. It was cool to see concepts I'm familiar with from another medium applied to web design; I'll definitely keep them in mind!

The morgue file tip is great. I really like drawing inspiration from other things I see on the web, in magazines, etc., so to see this concept put down as an actual "tip" is cool. It was also helpful to see the different types of navigation laid out with examples. It reaffirmed my dislike of right-hand navigation. The footer navigation layout was interesting, though I think it would only work on websites where you would actually read all the information on the page from top to bottom. Not a lot of people read a page's full content all the way to the bottom, so some might miss that navigation. One type of website that this type of navigation might work on is newspaper websites. I visit a lot of those for my job and I have to dig through a lot of them to find contact information and newspaper sections. If it were in the footer navigation it would be on every page!