I recently took a little survey with my design class to see what type of project they would be interested in pursuing as we wrap up the semester.  At our school all of the students have blogs that are used regularly so I thought one of the options should be to revamp their blogs and give them some more visual appeal.  I was surprised to find that the idea of adding a personal touch to their blogs was very enticing to whole class.  Several students claimed to have never done a single thing to their blogs because nobody ever showed them how.  The level of enthusiasm for this project got me excited to develop this unit but I was even more excited because it so nicely brought us back to all of the design elements that we have been discussing throughout the semester.

To kick of the unit we watched the OffBook video on “the Art of Wed Design”.  Side note, if you are not familiar with OffBook I highly recommend it. It is a great collection of shorts put together by PBS on Art in the Digital world.

This video gives a little history about web design and at the same time helps to generate some discussion about basic elements to consider when designing a web site. Some of these elements were typography, usability, layout, content, and color.  With these things in mind students took a look at their own blogs and asked themselves two questions.

1. What bugs me about my blog?
2. If I could do anything what would I like to change about my blog?

After our mini brainstorming sessions we will be dug a little deeper.  The second phase to our research process was to look at the article Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design by Brandon Jones. Students opened the article in an app that allowed them to annotate it in order to highlighting what they felt were the key components to each section.  Afterward we took turns sharing what we highlighted for extra clarity. With this new information in mind students were then asked to return to their lists of things that bugged them and things they wanted to change to make any further clarifications or add-ons.

With a complete list in hand of ways to move forward we will set out to do make three major changes.  Students will:

1. Pick a new theme
   1. As students began looking deeper into wordpress themes they will have their lists of what they would like to change as well as their knowledge of the elements of good web design to help guide them.
2. Reorganize your content
   1. Students will make sure the content fits into the new theme in a user friendly and aesthetically pleasing way. Some of these changes will include but are not limited to the following:
      1. adding categories to posts.
      2. Making a Home page more like an about me page.
      3. Parenting posts and ordering pages.
      4. Adding or subtracting widgets.
      5. Adjusting the layout of columns, scrollbars and posts.
3. Design a new header
   1. We will use our adobe suite skills to create a new personalized header. We have been using many of the adobe suite products throughout the semester and students have done a great job developing their skills with digital imagery. They are allowed to use their own images, create a mashup, remix of an image using creative commons.

At the moment my students are about half way through revamping their blogs.  Fun things are happening and I’m excited to see the end results.  As kids finish up they will be posting a reflection to explain the reasoning behind all of their changes.  I know thier have been a lot of little bumps in the road where students find they are not always able to do everything they want but this has been a good lesson as well.

In the end I’m most excited because this final project that accomplishes several things. First, it teaches the students several new concepts about web design. Second, it reviews many of the key components and tools that we have been building on all semester. Finally and most importantly  this unit allows for the student to put some individuality and personal flare into a product that they will be continuing to use in the future.