Project 3 Reflection

Project 3 was different from the previous projects in that I felt like we moved at a much quicker pace. One way that I can tell that I have improved since the previous projects is that I was able to come up with ideas for visual language faster, and I also spent considerably less time staring at the screen trying to come up with an implementation of an idea (especially on the six visual fragments). I also feel like that my hierarchy, while it still certainly has room for improvement, came a bit more naturally to me this time – and with some help, I feel like I was able to create an easy to understand arrangement of complex hierarchy.

One struggle that I still felt on this project was color choice. Insight that I got in class critiques on Wednesday helped me to find a little bit more defined direction (as far as background pallet, link color, header image color, tag cloud color, etc) but up until that point all I knew was that something was off about the color – I just wasn’t sure how to fix it.  A somewhat more conceptual struggle that I faced, surprisingly, was how to present the archive page. I spent a lot of time thinking about and sketching out complex headers for the archive page (images, layout changes, etc). I ended up settling on a very simple label for the archive page, simply because that is what most of the “inspiration” professional blogs had done.

Technically, I felt much more confident in Photoshop starting off this project. For the first time, I was brave enough to try somewhat more complex textures and shading – although this may have led me to overemphasize certain visual languages. I also, throughout the project, had to refrain myself from adding too many different visual language options. I also feel like that I got a bit too excited about these new ideas that I tried, and ended up leaving some of the remaining visual language options a bit overemphasized. As we looked at our work this morning after turning it in and looking at the work from the rest of the class, I could already pick out several places that seemed over exaggerated (lines, custom shading on certain elements, etc). So while I am excited to branch out and try new things in Photoshop, I need to work not to let this distract me from using tastefully balanced visual language.