Welcome to the World Wide Web. In this summer intensive studio course, students create work within and around the web browser to explore the World Wide Web (WWW). In particular, this course focuses on the impact of the WWW on art, design, and communication. Students will learn some of the foundational languages of front-end web development, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, in order to develop their own unique graphic forms and interactions. This is first and foremost a course on the communication and transmission of information. Special attention will be paid to content, navigation, pacing, interface, and interaction. No prior experience in programming is required.
This course is part of the Yale Summer Session. As such it is open to current students at Yale College, students from Visiting Colleges (International or otherwise), Pre-College students, and beyond. Enrollment, however, is capped at 16.
This course meets for 10 sessions over a span of 5 weeks. Given the condensed structure of the summer session, this course will be fast-paced and intense. Generally, any class will contain some combination of: Sharing, Seminar, Working, Critiquing
In this class, students should strive to make memorable, functional online experiences. You will be evaluated according to your overall engagement and active participation in the projects and exercises. Please note the invention of useful products is not the focus of this class, but the invention of useful techniques and approaches might be.
The first 3 weeks of the course (Classes 1–6) will focus heavily on learning front-end coding languages for the web (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). There will be Lab Assignments to exercise these skills. For the remaining 2 weeks (Classes 7–10) students will employ their coding skills in the completion and polishing of projects.
See Calendar.
Students may change or update their work through the end of the course. Final work will be graded on students’ individual class websites on Sunday, August 5th.
During Class 2, students will create their own class websites hosted on GitHub Pages. These websites will house all coursework—not only final projects, but also any related sketches, reading responses, labs, etc. Everything completed in class should appear on the website, as it will be used to determine a student’s final grade at the end of the course. Students should feel free to design this site to their liking as well.
While this course is about technology and requires it, the policy in this course is simple: Be considerate of your fellow classmates. For example, if someone is presenting their work, please don't simultaneously use your device. Put your device away and provide the presenter with your active attention.
Attendance to all classes is essential and required. There are only 10 sessions, so each one is incredibly important. Three or more unexcused absences will result in a failing grade. Three or more late arrivals (more than 10 minutes late) equals an absence. Keep me up to date. If you absolutely must miss class, email me in advance.
Students should bring their personal laptops to class. If they don’t have laptops, they should make arrangements to use the existing lab computers or have some other means of presenting their work.
Students are responsible for their own files, making sure to always back them up in some way. We will discuss using Git and GitHub early in the Summer for this, but it’s good to back up files often. For editing and updating code, students should download a code editor such as Atom, Brackets, Visual Studio Code, or Sublime Text. For image-making and sketching, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are standard tools available on most Yale computers. Other good digital-image making tools include a phone, digital camera, scanner, screen capture, etc.
By the end of this course, students will have experience in designing and coding their own websites using basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making and evaluating typographic and design decisions within the context of the WWW, proposing and developing unique interactive projects and describing their design process with peers in a critique setting.
Students will become familiar with using pre-existing language, images, and software as raw material while creating entirely new works. While making websites, we will learn which technologies could be appropriated and how to properly credit their inclusion.
From Academic Integrity at MIT: "Writing Code"
“Writing code is similar to academic writing in that when you use or adapt code developed by someone else as part of your project, you must cite your source. However, instead of quoting or paraphrasing a source, you include an inline comment in the code. These comments not only ensure you are giving proper credit, but help with code understanding and debugging.”
“You should not simply re-use code as the solution to an assignment. Like academic writing, your code can incorporate the ideas of others but should reflect your original approach to the problem.”
For better practice, retype someone else's code instead of copying and pasting it. It'll help you learn! On that note, avoid pasting huge blocks of code. Remember to do things one step at a time so you can fully understand what each part is doing.
This class has been generously shaped by many. Special thanks in particular to Laurel Schwulst. Numerous aspects of this course and its syllabus were shaped by and influenced from Laurel's own work; thanks too for the work of past teachers and colleagues Dan Michaelson, Ryan Waller, Ayham Ghraowi, Maxime Harvey, Eric Nylund, and Mindy Seu, and current teaching assistant Willis Kingery.