12.–26.08.2018 RMIT University
Masters of Communication Design
Mondays, Studio 09.
This course will begin by looking at your machine, as system and framework in an effort to understand what the fundamentals of what a website is and how it functions both online and offline. By utilising your knowledge about composition, typography, and hierarchy as a basis – we will draw comparisons between the contemporary tools and the modern web browser as a space for design. The outcome for this series of workshops is a static portfolio.
Sign up for a GitHub account - you will be using this account to store and host the work you do for the course, as well as for final submissions.
My website is a shifting house....by Laurel Schwulst
- A brief history of the internet
- An introduction to using the terminal
- An introduction to using git & github
Readings: The Shape of the Network....by Tung-Hui Hu
- Basics of document structure
- How do tags work? When to use what.
- Setting up a project structure
Readings: Captives of the Cloud Pt.1 by Metahaven
- the relationship between content and presentation
- inline or external?
- Basics of CSS including syntax, selectors, comments, style, positioning etc
Readings: (tbc)
Your Mac includes a console application called Terminal.app, located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. The easiest way to open Terminal.app is to use the Spotlight shortcut ⌘+Space and then type "Terminal".
Once your terminal is open you can add it to your Dock for quick access.
The terminal accepts a form of computer code at the prompt called bash, and is used to interact with the various functions of your computer.
git should be already installed on your Mac and almost ready to go. However when you first run git the XCode Developer Tools will need to be installed.
In your terminal, enter the following command to start the process if necessary.
git --version
Next tell git to only ask for your password once and remember it.
git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
Tell git your name and email address.
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
GitHub is an online platform for hosting code and providing tools for publication and collaboration with other developers. Your git command line tool will "push" and "pull" code from GitHub.
Visit GitHub and create an account. Use the name email address you entered into your git config. Remember your username and password.
Your username will form part of your website addresses, ie https://public-office.github.io/workshop-syllabus
Computer code is text. When writing code you will use a plain text editor. Any text editor can work, however there are speciailised text editors that are designed for writing code, offering useful features such as syntax highlighting, code hints/completion and file management.
Download and install one of the following code editors:
* We assume you will choose Atom as your editor during the course.
In this course we will use Google Chrome as our web browser. If you haven't already, download and install Chrome here.