Course start: 24.02.2004, 10:00 am
Kong-Oscarsgate 62, room 201
Final presentation: 19.03.2004

During the “Editorial Design”-period study-year 2003/2004 students have the option to choose between a web-based or a print-based editorial design course unit. It is not possible to join both units at the same time.

This course is a follow-up to the basic course “Introduction into web design” and it is designed for viskom students with good graphic, typographic and HTML-skills, but students from a different background are highly welcomed to join the course as well. Due to the technical situation (number of computers) the course must be limited to a restricted number of students. Please get in touch with teacher in advance.

The goal of the course is to design a realistic online magazine based on dynamic content. Requirements and tasks of contemporary web design have to be considered for the project, a highly efficient and usable web solution is expected. Each student is supposed to elaborate their own fictive online magazine and a corresponding "web design style guide" manual. All projects have to be created on a self-responsible basis. Please mind that the main goals of the course do not lie within experimentalism and/or animation, although multimedia content can be very well implemented.

It is not obligatory to fully code each web site project, a dummy version created in Adobe Image Ready or similar software will perfectly do. Technical assistance in coding can be arranged “on demand”. Students who decide to use this course period to deepen their coding skills and need technical assistance have to get in touch with teacher well in advance!

The course starts off repeating in short methods of analysis and conceptual web site planning as well as principles of interface design, information architecture and usability. As a first task students evaluate web based magazines in detail and present their research results in front of the group. We will discuss all individual evaluations in context of each student's planned project.

Students start off profiling their projects in respect of a main communication goal, key target group, technical features, and nature of content. All elaborated profiles will be shown in a screen-based presentation and will be discussed in front of the whole group.
As a basis for later web design a realistic amount of content, e.g. texts, images and (optional) multimedia files has to be collected and/or created for each project. This body of content has to be structured and categorised. All necessary interaction elements have to be listed and classified, a storyboard has to be sketched before designing a navigation concept and executing the web design.
Each milestone during the project (profile, storyboard, structure, visual approach, navigation structure) will be presented and discussed in the group. Alongside the course will be a series of lectures, including external guests, who will give an introduction into connected technical issues such as “databases” and “server side scripting”.