Summarize and Reflect on Week 2

The readings in the book this week were eye opening. I never would have thought that you would need to consider so many different aspects when designing for the web. Chapter 9 went into detail about color. It explained the differences between CMYK color used in printing and RBG color you view on the web. The sections on bit depth and monitor resolution described terms I have heard often but never understood like 24 bit opposed to 8 bit. The last parts of the chapter dealt with choosing the correct colors, how to create web-safe colors and hybrid web-safe colors. Chapter 10 reviewed file types and formats. Some of the chapter was included in last week’s reading assignment. GIF and JPEG are explained along with an explanation of the differences between pixel-based or raster type graphics as opposed to math-based or vector type graphics. The chapter also covers selecting the right file size, creating and using thumbnails and a section on image maps. I have been on numerous sites that use image maps but never knew what they were called. The book made them seem relatively easy to create. I would have assumed they were much more complicated. Chapter 12 was all about type. It introduced me to the terms serif and sans serif and when to use them. I learned that like colors fonts must be chosen with care. Not all fonts are created equal and not all will displayed the same on all systems. You can control the font a viewer sees to varying degrees by using different default settings. The chapter explained special characters and provided the html code to make a number of them. It allows me to display my "quotes" as “quotes”. The readings in Diigo dealt with resolution and scanning. One of the links on resolution was no longer available. I was interested in learning how a scanner really works but as I delved into the scan tips reading I was getting more and more confused every time I clicked next. The author kept saying everything was easy but it clearly wasn’t for me. I moved on to the last reading and chose a few articles to view. I read about the advantages to cropping a photo rather than using digital zoom when taking the picture in the first place. I also read two articles related to increasing size and resolution.