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About Me Official Beta Tester Web Designer Mike Burroughs18/Male/United States Recent Activity Deviant for 3 Years
7 Month Premium Membership Statistics 70 Deviations
524 Comments
5,682 Pageviews

Mushroom Cloud

If the bombs go off
The sun will still be shining
Because every Mushroom Cloud
has a Silver Lining
// Cave In // Owl City // Poster by Mike Burroughs
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Love Can Take It

Love Can Take It 2.0
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Student Leaders Club blog
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Love Can Take It 1.5
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WOTW Home Page 1.0
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The single largest project I've ever been on. It has over 300 informational files, an art gallery powered by dA, event manager powered by Facebook, and a large public event forum which integrates with our Facebook. As the site is released for public preview, I will upload for critique
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I'm a web designer based in Atlanta, GA who specializes in network-centric web systems. I am familiar with the popular cPanel interface, IIS 6.0 and 7.0 and Server Management on Mac OS X Server. It's my passion to find the perfect balance of beautiful design and seemless functionality, no matter how deep into a script or server configuration I have to go to achieve it.

Editorial: Efficient Web Design

Journal Entry: Sat Nov 21, 2009, 8:56 AM
On my third day in Broadcast Video Production, my teacher had a profound quote written on the blackboard. Perhaps it was not a quote, but certainly valuable wisdom. “Shoot to edit” was stretched across the chalky panorama, yielding any space only to the days date in the top corner. This wisdom didn’t cure cancer, you didn’t hear it in a love song, and it certainly didn’t start a revolution, but it evoked the creative in me to start thinking not as an aspiring artist, but as an aspiring designer. “Shoot to edit” became “design to code” and “build to use”. Sadly, however, it seems some popular designers skipped this important lesson, and it’s cause a serious downfall in web technologies today.

In October of 2006, I became a member of a creative online community known as DeviantArt. I came for the Anime, and I stayed because I found the work of one Felix Valentin, my original inspiration to look for more work like his, and eventually open up Dreamweaver and Fireworks for the first time. I was a High School Freshman, and clueless as to the difference of a <head> tag and a <body> tag, but I didn’t much care. I used as my canvas the still-popular MySpace website, which seemed only to grow and had no worries. Time progressed, and my work got better. Not great, but better. After a year, I hit a point where I was actually willing to post my work in my DeviantArt gallery, and as I kept learning, my work got greater and greater. It wasn’t until just the start of this semester that I realized I had learned in a bizarre way that others hadn’t. I knew I had taught myself, but I figured 2+2=4 regardless of how you find that out. I was wrong and I found it utterly shocking.

I figured out what it was about me that was so different: I had learned the standards together. There was no natural progression from easy to medium to hard. I started at hard and hacked away at it until I got it right. Until I could look at something and know exactly how it was done, or at least how I could do it, too. My assumption was that every site that was pumped out of Photoshop or Fireworks was created with heart and soul, and most importantly, the next stage in mind. My assumption was that every designer knew his or her way around a stylesheet and maybe even a php.ini file. My mistake. Or rather, the mistake of many designers. That’s the focus of this article: Workflow Progression and there lack of.

I want to make clear that you can have a beautiful site that is practical, but having an impractical site is virtually guarantee annoyance for you and your users. Yes, that background of a tunnel is mighty nice, but is it worth the wait to download all 2 megabytes of it? Yes, that blog looks great, but how are you going to get that type to look that good in every modern browser on every common operating system? In a design class, a student, whose section was news on the school site, pointed out to the teacher, “It doesn’t, like, matter if it’s slow. It’s the only site that has the information, and they need it, so they’ll just hafta wait!” A week after the site that the class had created launched, the Parent, Teacher and Student Association elected an official site-checker, whose responsibility was to get information off the site and send out an e-mail newsletter so others wouldn’t be forced to go to the site. It’s this type of attitude that worries me. Technical feasibility is ignored in favor of shine and gloss. Accessibility is ignored in favor of making it look great on Safari.

My Call-To-Action, if you will, is this: learn. If you are a web designer, know how the web works. Don’t just create something shiny in an image application and slice it up. Design knowing what kind of code you’ll need to use to achieve this, and how you can make it this awesome without adding 55 seconds to the load time. Know the standards, and know what kind of plugins and hacks there are for things, and don’t be afraid to create something more than once or twice to find the most manageable way of doing it. If you want a blog which has titles in Gotham or Myriad Pro, learn about Cufon or SIFR. If you want an efficient way to show large photos on your homepage, don’t be afraid to test a Flash component or JQuery item. My point is this: make it beautiful, but make it functional, too. Don’t just create something and slice it, or outsource it to a developer who will just end up annoyed at how inefficient the design is. Think ahead, and don’t be afraid to use patterns and reusable assets. And most importantly, think about the vastly different users who want to use this, but only if it enriches their lives and won’t make them feel like they’re wasting their time on waiting.


--Examples-------------------
EQuilibrium Discotheque by SiostraNocy
Yakovae by Osec

No Comments | Previous Journal Entries
  • Mood: Joy
  • Listening to: Song In My Head - Sherwood
  • Reading: Paper Towns - John Green
  • Drinking: Dr. Pepper

Devious Info

  • Current Residence: Georgia
  • deviantWEAR sizing preference: Large
  • Print preference: My whole freakin' wall
  • Interests: Web Design, Art, Love, Chicken Flavored Ramen
  • Favourite movie: The American President, e2: Design (PBS)
  • Favourite band or musician: Everclear, Imogen Heap, Postal Service, Owl City, Explosions In The Sky, Rediscover
  • Favourite genre of music: I like songs for their meanings, not their genres.
  • Favourite artist: Felix Valentin, Miika Ahvenjärvi
  • Favourite poet or writer: KazexHane
  • Favourite photographer: Jono Renton
  • Favourite style of art: Vector, Photographic Realism, Surrealism
  • Operating System: OS X 10.5 Server, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008
  • MP3 player of choice: Microsoft Zune 80
  • Shell of choice: Explorer. Plain and simple.
  • Wallpaper of choice: Something pretty
  • Skin of choice: Serenity (Green) by *HeyLove
  • Favourite game: Halo: Combat Evolved
  • Favourite gaming platform: XBOX360
  • Favourite cartoon character: Itchy And Scratchy
  • Personal Quote: "Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood insane asylum"
  • Tools of the Trade: CS4 Master, Flex, IIS 7, ColdFusion and Leopard Server

Places to Find Me

Facebook
LinkedIn
DesignersCouch
Andradica

Note:
The quote to the left is from Paper Towns by John Green. I highly recommend you read it. It's not just a novel, but a masterpiece that will change how you see other people.

Comments


:iconblind91:
~blind91 Nov 17, 2009, 9:05:26 AM
thanks for the fav :w00t:

--
Member of #designerscouch and ~ArtistUnion and *theblackpixel

seen this? [link] :wave:

Have a nice day, buddies! :dance:
:iconkarakuji:
~Karakuji Nov 8, 2009, 4:35:46 AM
thank you for the fav :)

--
Das ist das letzte Mal, dass ich dein Blut aufwische.
:iconizobalax:
~Izobalax Oct 7, 2009, 4:15:13 PM
Thanks for the :+fav:!

/izo\
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