WEB2025

Right away on Day 2, we jumped into getting introduced to HTML and CSS! Before we even thought about designing things that looked "nice" and worthy of being made by designers, it felt like a better idea to get our hands and brains a little messy. This exercise was similar to splashing paint on walls or doodling on the back of notebooks; except we needed to get our sites to look as ugly as possible with any new CSS properties we could discover. Starting with a plain, unstyled HTML document, we proceeded to making the biggest mess we could manage in an afternoon. Our sites were up on the internet from the second day too!

Next up was learning how to take a piece of free-flowing text and design a layout for it. The twist here, of course, was to think about how to structure it in HTML _and_ figure out what CSS would bring it to life. That meant every step, or misstep, would very much be our own. Each of us was to transform one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales into a webpage that demonstrated the use of flexbox and floats, typography choices with fonts, incorporated images, and drew inspiration from CSS Zen Garden while experimenting with techniques from Jen Simmons' works. This project became an initiation into the rich tradition of developers wrestling with CSS, losing hours to tweaking margin and padding, and joining the ranks of those searching "how to center a div," and discovering that the most valuable skills weren't memorizing CSS properties but learning to search for answers effectively, debug systematically, and know when to ask for help.