Reflection – Zach Wulf

This project was very challenging for me, mainly because on the heavy emphasis on illustration and artistic capability. As an experiment with designing an unconventional but creative website I don’t think I excelled, but I believe I improved from the last project in a few areas that needed work.

My biggest regret conceptually was not giving my shop a distinctive brand or identity; I really wish I would have drawn a handmade type for the business name instead of just using a prefab font. After seeing much of the illustrative work of others, it really would have strengthened my pages to add some kind of subtle personal touch consistently throughout the site.

Another big conceptual hurdle I have trouble overcoming is breaking the ‘barrier’ between a website and an intentionally designed piece. There is something intrinsically different when a user visits a site and doesn’t feel like they’re on a website, and I want to achieve that level of quality in my work. I am still operating within the rules of  traditional web programming, and it is admittedly a hard habit to break.

On a technical level, I believe I am getting a better feel for using the grid structure on the web. Deciding which elements of a site are allowed to hang off of the main body, how subheadings and elements should behave within the grid and the placement of images are all things I think I’ve improved on from the last project by a little. It was a bit easier not having to deal with as much raw content for this site, but that made dealing with negative space much more of a challenge. Learning how to handle awkwardness on the homepage of a site with not a lot of content is a real challenge for me, and I have a lot of room for improvement in that area.

I’m also not sure if I’m getting the hang of color. In the small group critiques my group members all unanimously agreed to stick with the color scheme I used for the final, but after playing around for several hours I’m still not crazy about it.

With this project I had two goals:

1) Don’t make the user have to dig for important information and
2) Make the user hungry

In this regard I’m pretty pleased with what I made, but as stated before the site really needed that little extra something to make it a personal site for a ‘mom and pop’ type shop.