“Final” Prism Wireframes

Despite whatever I might have said in previous blog posts, coding was quite a challenge for me and not something I could see myself devoting sustained attention to, so I was pleased to find some inkling of intuition about graphic design. My days of designing my high school newspaper on antiquated Adobe software suddenly became relevant, and all the time I waste perusing Fab.com and looking for affordable mid-century housewares on Craigslist can now be called “design research.” With lots of help from Jeremy and the internets, a Prism homepage is in development, complete with a header and footer and floated text and working links. Of course we’ll need to do a lot more than that to get this thing looking nearly as good as some of Ed’s designs in Adobe Illustrator, but I finally have some sense of what it will take, and with so many others on the Praxis team interested in design, it all seems possible.

Since I’m so new to HTML and CSS, I have no shame about asking for help with the smallest issues (like italicizing text) or with far-reaching errors (the whole page is the body?!), but I also have no shame about celebrating the smallest successes (rounded corners!). In addition to a few meetings with Jeremy, Ed’s great ideas and Illustrator skills and Annie and David’s HTML knowledge have helped me make progress. People are probably going to start sending me “Let me Google that for You” links pretty soon, but at least right now, I’m feeling warm and fuzzy and collaborative. On Monday morning, Brooke, Sarah, Jeremy, Ed, and I worked through the wireframes for Prism one more time. We had some drafts from the end of last semester, but some decisions about how the tool will work have affected how the site will look, so we revisited our wireframes and got them in good enough shape to present to the whole team on Tuesday. This picture shows what we came up with. It doesn’t look like much, but I think we all feel pretty accomplished now that we have a “clean” and simple form to design on.