Welcome to the home stretch of the semester! I hope you’ve been enjoying your Thanksgiving break, and I hope you return to campus with fully charged batteries. The remainder of our semester will be dedicated to the Electronic Portfolio project, which is due during finals week. We’ll begin next week by wrapping up the Document Makeover project, then we’ll turn our attention to some of the fundamental concepts of designing documents for the web. Here’s a quick overview of Week 14:

• Your Unit #3 project is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday. Before you finalize your project, please review the assignment sheet to make sure you have included all of the required deliverables (memo of transmission; original document; finished document; and drafts, if you think they would help me evaluate your project). To submit your project, bring printed copies of your deliverables to class and upload a zipped file containing your project folder (named as follows: “Full Name 2329 Unit 3″) to my Dropbox before you come to class. (I will send out the password for my Dropbox via email.) If you need help preparing your InDesign files for submission, I recorded a short tutorial that explains how to “preflight” and “package” InDesign files. There is no other homework for Tuesday — just focus on wrapping up Unit #3. In class, we will conduct a workshop on HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS).
• On Thursday, we will discuss different approaches to creating electronic portfolios. Before you come to class, please read the following articles:
  • “Creating a Successful Online Portfolio,” by Sean Hodge
  • “Best Practices for Effective Design of ‘About Me’ Pages,” by Mark Nutter
  • “My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too,” by Kyle Meyer
  • “The Vanishing Personal Site,” by Jeffrey Zeldman

  After reading these articles, search for examples of excellent portfolio sites created by undergraduate students and link to at least two of them in the comments section of this post. We’ll analyze some of the best ones in class on Thursday.

If you have any questions about these plans, or if you want me to look at your Unit #3 project before you submit it, please come see me during office hours (9-12) on Monday morning. Otherwise, I’ll see you in class on Tuesday!