Project 1 Reflection

During this project I confronted several of my built-in expectations regarding web design and learned  a great deal about the way I work.

I feel that my biggest weakness conceptually at this point is my limited scope when pursuing design options. I opted for a conservative redesign of the site, but after seeing some of the other student’s rough comps in class I immediately felt that I really should have pursued more variety in the elements and in the overall designs. In the coming projects ahead I will be sure to explore any alternatives that come to mind. This stemmed directly from not sketching out my ideas on paper, and in turn it was more difficult brainstorming in Photoshop on a blank canvas.

Technically I need to work on creating dynamic shapes and playing around with shadows and gradients more in my design. It was hard for me to incorporate some of the subtlety necessary in making the final product stand out, and it was a little rough switching back to Photoshop after spending the last several months in Illustrator. In the projects ahead I will prioritize my work and communicate often to receive feedback at critical points in the process.

I have improved marginally from the beginning of this project with hierarchy and emphasis. Choosing how to distinguish links and headings and organizing content on a page are things I feel relatively confident about at this point, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. I am looking forward to receiving feedback from the use cases in Projects 2 and 3, as I have had to conduct some for other classes. I need to improve on time management, experimentation and color on future sites.

Overall this has been a much needed and humbling opportunity to gauge where I stand as an aspiring web designer, and where I need to go from here. This is a very different approach to how I have designed sites in the past – and it’s actually a lot easier for scalability and saving everyone time in the long run. I have a solid idea now of what to expect, and will hopefully improve with sufficient time and criticism.