Pages 2-5 of this book discuss the economic and philosophical justifications for copyright. This book excerpt helped me better understand the importance of copyright and why it is sometimes necessary.
Design Meltdown has yet another great explanation of design principles, this time for the principle of flow. The explanation incorporates great visual examples.
This website usually has my favorite design principle explanations. I just discovered the person who wrote them used the Basics of Design textbooks as their jumping off point for wrting them.
This site shows how to add widgets to your blog as well as how to embed images and videos in it. This is helpful for this week's assignment since we have to add widgets to our blog.
This site has several good tutorials. I think the Featured Posts tutorial and the tutorial that shows you how to put text over your lead graphic seem like they'd be interesting blog additions. The draw back on these changes is that you have to be familiar with web encoding though.
This is a great explanation of alignment that includes extensive examples of how it can be used well to bring unification to a layout. There are numerous examples rangin from business cards, to stationary, to title pages.
This article expands on BoD's introduction of how to use white space well. Whitespace can drastically enhance the balance of a page layout if used well.
This page explains contrast and its importance when creating visual interest. It discusses examples of contrast in web page design and how contrast in color, size, and alignment can be achieved.
Clear, simple instructions that explain how to write instructions. I like that this explanation implements all of the suggestions it makes in its own format. When creating my tutorial for project #1, I want to remember to "use clear and simple words" and to "be positive and focused (telling the reader what TO DO rather than what not to do)".
Gives good description and examples of the concept of Visual Hierarchy in Web Design and discusses its importance. Also has an exercise to do to test visual hierarchy when you come across a website.
One designer's commentary on design and explanation of his design processes. I like this site because it gives explanations of the design process with good visual examples as well as offers pointers on things to avoid when designing. This particular article has a good explanation of the process of copywriting. It's cool to see the designer's process - from brainstorm, to thumbnails, to final published product - alongside his explanation of it.