Web Directions

Andy Clarke’s Visual Web Design Masterclass — a big big day

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• March 16, 2009
• Leave a response

We thought it was great when Andy Clarke said he’d be keen to head back down to Australia and be a part of our road­show work­shop series in April, but we’re even more thrilled about it now that he has given us all a sneak peak at his slides for the day.

First and fore­most, the Visual Web Design Masterclass is 100% new mate­r­ial, so, if you came to Andy’s work­shop last time around, rest assured that you won’t already have seen any­thing he is going to cover in April.

See below for a few words from Andy him­self with some more detail on what the day is going to be all about. The Visual Web Design Masterclass will be in Melbourne on April 20, Canberra on April 22, and fin­ish up in Sydney on April 24. And remem­ber, this ter­rific day of learn­ing is only $450 with the Web Directions loy­alty code, so please do get in touch before you reg­is­ter if you haven’t received this.

About the Visual Web Design Masterclass

In this series of For A Beautiful Web Visual Design Master-​​classes, the focus will be on mak­ing the best design pos­si­ble for the web. You will learn about ways to dis­cover new ideas and the day will inspire you to find new, more cre­ative ways of work­ing. The master-​​class con­tent is all new, never before pre­sented out­side of the UK.

During the day you will learn new ways to find cre­ative inspi­ra­tion to make bet­ter designs, by look­ing out­side of the web at archi­tec­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy and print and by open­ing your eyes to the things around you. You’ll learn how being play­ful with design and bend­ing and break­ing the rules will take your designs in new and unex­pected directions.

Typography

95% of the infor­ma­tion on the web is writ­ten lan­guage. It is only log­i­cal to say that a web designer should get good train­ing in the main dis­ci­pline of shap­ing writ­ten infor­ma­tion, in other words: Typography.

(Source)

As typog­ra­phy is a key com­po­nent of great design, you will learn how to improve your web typog­ra­phy through clas­sic tech­niques. These include using the typo­graphic scale, base­line grids and ver­ti­cal rhythm (lead­ing), the mea­sure and how to enhance your web typog­ra­phy by using the cor­rect char­ac­ters and glyphs. You’ll also learn how to cre­ate new web page lay­outs based on clas­sic typography.

Layout

You will learn how to use grids to improve your lay­outs, then how mov­ing beyond com­mon align­ment grids to cre­ate your own unique grids based on archi­tec­ture, comic books and paint­ings will make your designs dis­tinc­tive. You will also see how com­bin­ing ancient and mod­ern lay­out tech­niques can lead to dra­matic results.

These tech­niques will include how to use the Golden Section to cre­ate bal­anced designs and how golden and root rec­tan­gles will keep your design ele­ments in per­fect pro­por­tion. You will learn how sym­met­ri­cal and asym­met­ri­cal grids can be com­bined to strik­ing effect and how to uti­lize these grids for page lay­outs and inter­face ele­ments. You will dis­cover about how to place images and their cap­tions into your designs in dif­fer­ent and inter­est­ing new ways.

Design details

Working on the fine details of your designs can be the most reward­ing. You will learn about bal­ance, line-​​work and tex­ture and this master-​​class will teach you how to turn a good design into a great design by focussing on these details.

This Web Visual Design Master-​​class is a fun, inter­ac­tive day and I hope that you will enjoy the day as much as those that attended it in London last December did.

3 responses to “Andy Clarke’s Visual Web Design Masterclass — a big big day”:

1. • By:phil c
   • March 16th, 2009
   

   Great that the mod­fa­ther of web design is com­ing back. yep went to andy’s pre­sen­ta­tions a cou­ple of years ago, eas­ily the best thing at the web direc­tions con­fer­ence. Sure there was some code speak, but its pri­mar­ily about communication

   Great ideas, inno­v­a­tive but also quite sim­ple and obvi­ous, the comic book stuff, and gen­eral the­o­ries based on the his­tory and fun­da­men­tal rules of visual art and design, bril­liant,
   appar­ently too rad­i­cal for the organ­i­sa­tion I work in– a shame–
   makes me won­der why they paid to send me along.

2. • By:Grant
   • March 24th, 2009
   

   Why can’t these road­shows come to Brisbane also. I mean Canberra?

3. • By:Jimmy
   • June 2nd, 2009
   

   Will we get the videos or any other stuff to view of this lecture.

Your opinion: