How time flies when you don’t have class for three straight weeks. If it wasn’t for attending the Virginia Forum, I might have forgotten that I’m actually a grad student instead of just a guy who spends time messing around in Dreamweaver and Photoshop after work.
I hope all of you are doing well and having success with Photoshop and so forth, and I’m looking forward to seeing everybody Monday.
OK, so where am I at?
I have done some editing on my type assignment, and I’m reasonably happy with it although truth be told there’s probably more that could use doing. I never fixed the footnotes, and I haven’t really figured out the whole relative/absolute thing as far as how it would be at all useful for my site. But I think it looks reasonably clean, I like where the block and pull quotes are located, the font seems readable, and all things considered it’s a workable site.
I also did a proper “home” page, and got the internal links to work fine. Finally, I did an “About” page from scratch which looked great in Dreamweaver, but has not turned out right live. I’ve tried a few things, and it’s still giving me troubles. I used the ‘aside’ property in HTML5 instead of “sidebar”, and I’m wondering if either I don’t get how to use it properly or I need to go back to “sidebar”. At any rate, I felt like I needed to move forward and work on Photoshop, so I’m leaving it alone for now but later this week I’ll return to it with a hopefully fresh pair of eyes.
I’ve found that while listening to the webinars is nice, the best approach for my comfort level is just going through “The Non-Designer’s Photoshop Book” and trying to do the same simple exercises. They are, largely, VERY simple, but that’s OK–the frequent repetition of the same tools helps build familiarity and I think even gives me a slight hint of what it would feel like really “know” this tool and get the rhythms of how adept users use it.
More updates to follow once I make some real progress, but in the meantime I’ve commented on Mika’s blog and Beth’s blog.
Kirk Johnson's Digital History Blog 
I’ve also really enjoyed the Non-Designer’s Photoshop Book. I’ve felt that this will be useful to me for future references, and the steps are super easy to follow.
Kirk,
I saw your homepage, revised type assignment, and your About page. These pages are all wonderful! It looks very clear, simple, and every margins, spaces looks great to me. After we have a chance to play more with the Photoshop, maybe you can edit the photo in your About page, too! And I enjoyed participating the Virginia Forum! See you again at the Forum next year!
Mika