Mini Zen Garden, Fall 2007

WRT 351: Writing for the World Wide Web

A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design -- CSS Zen Garden

Design Report

Overview

• Design Strategies.

  The overall theme of my design is simple (black and white) and swirly (embellishments). I achieved this theme by not using any colors and keeping my images to a minimum.

  Black and white are on totally opposite sides of the color wheel (or shade wheel). Although it may seem boring or too formal, black and white serves its purpose for this particular website. This website is made for students and meant to be functional, so the text, which has rules for the assignment, must be easily readable. This black and white design complements its HTML co-part. Also, the use of black and white as the main theme makes this an appealing design for the colorblind-user.

• Describe the process of working on your design. Much like in thinking about the stages you go through in creating a piece of writing, discuss the process of putting together your design. For example, talk about your invention and revision processes. Be sure to discuss technologies you used and any technologies with which you had difficulties (and how you solved those difficulties).
• Credit ideas, graphics, code snippets, etc. borrowed from others. Notice the credits below where I have attributed the graphics of others that I have used.

Unlike your Mini Zen page, you should produce the HTML document for the Design Report. Feel free to use or modify this particular document page or the original Mini Zen page as you see fit. In styling this document, add your CSS to the default style.css file used by your Mini Zen page. In composing this document, follow good writing for the web practices.

Grading

Understand that your ability to explain your project in this report is as important to your grade as the design itself. Your Design Report is worth half the credit for your Mini Zen project.

Credits

Flower background image used with the Assignment Home style sheet courtesy of stock.xchng. Other graphics and images courtesy of squidfingers.

Charles Lowe
Department of Writing
Grand Valley State University
lowech@gvsu.edu
Design originally created Fall 2006

This HTML document is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. CSS style sheets and all graphics and images used are copyright 2007 by each individual author and do not carry the CC license unless otherwise indicated.

Thanks to David Shea for CSS Zen Garden and The Zen of CSS Design, as well as Steve Krause for suggesting this class project.