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.

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