Some headers I like

I chose these three because they are artistically appealing to me.
They are not like every other page on the internet but at the same time they function well.

http://firewheeldesign.com/

http://emotionslive.co.uk/

http://www.mastres.com/

New Header

I used JF Georgian Contrast. It came with Fireworks on the mac.
I used drop shadow and raised emboss filter. It gave it a very three dimensional effect.
The best image with smallest size was Png 8 with 16 colors.

Images

Here is a JPG http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/49792783/in/set-981332/ at the main link.
Well, it's a picture of a whole site.

Here is a Gig http://www.cwsomaha.com/templates/cwsomaha.com/images/widget.gif
It's from site http://www.cwsomaha.com/

This site has some nice ones.
http://emotionslive.co.uk

http://emotionslive.co.uk/portfolio/realsize/20060609003709.jpg
http://emotionslive.co.uk/img/logo.gif

I couldn't find a png at the sites you mentioned but i did find one at Apple.
http://images.apple.com/macmini/images/features_hero20090303.png
http://www.apple.com/macmini/features.html

It seems that 99% of the images are jpgs

more egypt

This is just a simple crop around the borders. I used the small jpg at 40%

more egypt

Here is the photo that I did the gradient exercise with. It didn't come out great but the instructions were hard to follow and had some mistakes so I had to it from scratch several times to get to this point.

This is jpeg small at 86%. The picture already looked blurry because of the gradient so it looked really bad if I made the quality any less.

sphynx

This is a picture I took that I cropped using the pen tool.
A small jpg at 40% was good enough. The background is all white now.

blogs

I found the following examples of various color schemes

http://www.freelanceswitch.com/ monochromatic green

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/ triadic chartreuse, magenta, orange

http://css-tricks.com/ analagous different kinds of brown

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ split complementary

http://www.techcrunch.com/ monochromatic

http://www.boingboing.net/ triadic

http://mashable.com/ analogous

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ split complementary

http://www.tmz.com/ desaturated red
http://www.readwriteweb.com/ saturated red


http://www.cinematical.com/ liked this site

nice template http://www.eblogtemplates.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/dilectio-blogger-med.jpg

New color scheme

I needed to reset the theme. The one that I had copied from another site was messing up the layout on this site.

I chose this scheme because it offered a lot of contrast. These color tools are interesting but it's substituting science for artistic sense and so I felt really locked in, between the color tool and the already designed templates.

I chose the analogic because it looked nicer.

This talking about art in these design classes is really driving me nuts. All the good designers I know can barely talk at all let alone go on and about all this stuff.

I don't really care for this design that much but I'm working within the limitations of this already set of templates that I didn't design.

Design Layout

My blog has two columns. The grid is 2/3 on the left and 1/3 on the right.
Colors are used to contrast the various sections. Size of fonts is used to also divide sections.
Space is used around the sections to separate them and it works with proximity to group things together. Similar content groups use repetition in look. I.e. you can easily see all the individual posts because they have a white background.

My favorite web site

One of my favorite websites is youtube.com .

I visit it almost everyday.

There are so many interesting videos there to watch, mostly educational videos are what I'm interested in. I.e. how to do various things?

Introduction

This is a blog for a web site design course I'm taking. GID 56 at Foothill college.
If you are not a student in this course, I don't think it will be very interesting.

I have done the programming for web sites before and done some simple ones myself but have never really studied web site design.

I have some I would like to do for myself and that's the main reason I'm taking the course.

You can see some of the simple ones I have done for myself.
http://www.reedkotler.com
http://www.toriirecords.com
http://www.reedkotlersystems.com

I'm a composer so I would say that's one of my main interests. My main hobby is speaking Russian. I enjoy programming computers too.

I want to start to develop a good website which presents me as a composer.