Private Label Applications

Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Template Design Kit |

CSS Navigation Generator - Color Manager

Today after working with Mark Panovia (Computer Science Instructor) and Justin Green (Desktop Publishing Instructor), we hashed out a few final edits to the Rapid Template Design Series. The printers as mentioned before will begin production sometime in August for the Fall Semester and the course will first be published in Washington State colleges then nationally if everything works well.

I wrote this post http://www.jaredritchey.com/rapid-template-design-series.html regarding the series a few weeks ago and as far as features goes nothing there has changed.

We did manage to convince a few freeware application developers to private label their applications and include some of our features and characteristics to better accommodate the course. Naturally since these are freeware and or shareware applications, they will be available for FREE download on http://www.templatedesignkit.com in compliance with the developers free distribution licenses.

Designer Tools of The Trade

So with the CSS Navigation Generator, the pending code snippet tool, the color wheel manager and hopefully a font manager among others, the course will deliver a lofty arsenal of tools to the student designer.

Since the focus of the course is for the student, ease of learning is critical and the right tools can make that experience easier. For years professionals in the design business have attempted to standardize many things including the tools of the trade. Starting in the early days with Adobe Page Maker or Quark Express for example, the first forms of instruction were not easy and rarely included layout guides and templates. Books and manuals produced by experts familiar with the applications, a dilemma surfaces, as documentation is written in technical terms by technical experts that quite literally require you to be very technical to understand it. For a student this catch 22 has long since been identified as problematic when course material makes broad assumptions of understanding.

The Rapid Template Design Series really shouldn’t have the name “Template” in it but templates are in fact foundation to nearly all design. Print, web, application interfaces, among other things follows a set of guides for optimal results. Because of this, those like us who have worked in the print media industry tend understand the use of complex grids and layout guides used to achieve consistency in our work. The same is also true of web design, and now that the term “Template” is synonymous with design layout, Rapid Template Design seems relevant because its familiar.

So only a few tiny little things, aside from desperate need more ca$h for the budget and a few holdouts on private labeling, we are close to making this a reality.

FYI the original budget that the college provided was a grant in the amount of ONLY $2,500 which was eaten up quickly for the plugins and code elements we had to purchase distribution licenses for. Thankfully many contributors and code providers to this course traded link and advertising space for their form of compensation. I’m fully grateful to the people at Utteraccess.com, Joomla, Mambo, Open-Realty, vBulletin, php.net, WordPress, and countless others that authorized use of their contribution and assisted to bring about this course. Special thanks to Adobe for the donation of 8 licenses of Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe InDesign Tools like these are instrumental to modern design processes.

Learn to Be A Design Professional

I’ve not really expanded on the target audience of this course so a brief mention would be beneficial. This course as mentioned on the college blog was created for entry level to intermediate level design students who seek mastery of the foundational or should I say fundamentals of design. This course is NOT for professional designers as much of it covers very mundane theories on color, layout and navigation in great depth. A lofty inventory of core elements is also provided including template layout masters, css contributions and code, working files, and private label software most professionals have already accumulated in knowledge and inventory alike. So this course is for students of design.

Comments

Leave a Comment

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Comments


TEMP CODE: GDHXCDX17249629