I’ve been working on fixing up my Design Project from my final year of Computer Engineering studies at University of Toronto. My group consisted of two people, namely Salman Sayany and myself. To recap, it was a conference management system built using open source tools, the highlight of which was Ruby on Rails.

We were never really happy with the kind of work we put into the whole thing so I decided to continue with the project after school ended. While applying for jobs, I started to add features here and there and tried to give the application a new visual feel. I started with the Author’s page and then moved on to the Administrator/Chair’s page with a goal of using no images, only CSS. This gave me a great opportunity to dig deeper into CSS and discover how cool it really is.

Lately though, I’ve been working on beautifying parts of the application that the user navigates through without being logged in. This means the login page, the registration page and the forgot password page.

One thing I’ve learned about web design is that mockups are very important! Prior to this project I’d only done non-web-related software development so I never really thought about color, layout, typography and other things important in web design (and design in general) but I’m finding that without mockups, it’s very hard for me to decide upon a design. I often just code mindlessly thinking up designs as I go but not with mockups. They give me direction when programming and I’ve found that my mockup to development time has been greatly improving.

Anyway, I hope to post a few screenshots of my progress soon.

I still can’t get a hold of Salman online to show him the new design!