Archive for ‘Reflection (P2)’

I think technical weaknesses I had was getting the website jpg to fit on the screen. Whenever I opened a 960 pixels document size in Photoshop and brought in the jpg it would scale down to a smaller size on screen. If I tried to scale it to the size it would pixelate and look blurry. I would get the 960 grid on the page but when I would put in the website jpg it wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to. Mainly, the website jpg wasn’t working for me with the right size.

I think conceptual mistakes where having the grids on screen as I made the website. On the homepage, I had the grids on there but with the other two sites I forgot to put the grids there. Therefore, I think some of the aligning is off.

I think throughout the process I saw improvement on hierarchy and making the site look more professional, rather than just shapes and text on a page to look like one. I think with the help of my wire frames, I could come up with a good layout and work on improving the page by improving visual elements and hierarchy to make it look better than my roughs.

I think I see a lot more improvement on this project than the last project we had. I think by coming up with a website design with a blank slate and going any direction we wanted really helped. I think last time since we had to make a website better, I had the mindset of just working with the same layout. On this project, I feel we had the freedom to choose what we wanted and coming up with a restaurant type, layout, design, and overall feel of the site helped improve the overall design of the site.I think inspiration helped a lot too to help improve with the design elements.

Overall, I think I need to learn on improving the website size which was a problem during this project. Also, I think as we keep working on designing websites then we will get better at designs…just like sketches, the more we make the better ideas come out.

I think I did a better job designing past my wireframes this project. My final AIGA redesign was basically the wireframe I made with color added. I didn’t work much past it, all of my directions were very similar. This time I did a better job picking completely different directions.

I had trouble making the website feel real. I think it is still missing some stuff, but the texture I used helped quite a bit.  I had to mess with a bunch of textures before I found one that worked well. I started with diagonal lines, which evolved into something weird as I continued to mess with them. My next try was to mimic the feel of the bricks in one of the photos. That worked well so I went with it.

I tried to do something similar on the large text on the home page, but I don’t think it worked well. I had a lot of trouble with the oversized words. They look weird without a treatment, but I can’t find a texture or color that works well. I’m still not very happy with how they look. Before I put this in my portfolio I will mess with the text and logo. I will also fix some of the details. I noticed that the drop shadows are different sizes throughout the site and I get off the grid by a couple of pixels every once in a while.

I need to do a better job following a process through the project. I sometimes work out a small detail before I’ve even sketched anything and end up building a website around that. This sometimes ends up alright for the one website I end up with, but if I want to build another direction I have to start from scratch. If I make myself build a process that works better I will be able to use the work I do throughout the early stages of the design to make each direction better.

After completing this project, its actually kind of fun to look back on it, because it was so open ended, and I think each student had an opportunity to show their own personality. It probably won’t be very often that an entry level graphic designer will get to completely develop their own web site however they want it. Usually we will be coached to create something the client is looking for specifically, and because of this, there is not as much of the artist’s identity in the site (or project). One thing I definitely struggled with in the beginning was the use of a background picture, and foreground pictures, and how to successfully merge the two. Every time I’d use an image of food or something, it would just look cheesy. Another setback I faced was not developing my final idea earlier. I liked the direction I ended up on, but I just wish I could have arrived there much earlier, so I could have had more time to evolve the over all design, and spend more time working on negative spaces, and hierarchy issues, and even color issues. I kinda shot myself in the foot by waiting as long as I did, but overall I am not too ashamed of my final project. Butt again, I do think this was a fun project and I definitely enjoyed the freedom to explore your own theme, and choose your own target audience.

At the start of this project I have to admit I was a bit overwhelmed. The task at hand seemed almost impossible! I am the type of person that when presented with too many options, I get a little scared. Like I stated in critiques, this type of design has proven to be extremely difficult for me. I get so caught up in the “box” and the grid and all the things that could possibly constrain you in the process of web design. Trying to find different ways and different approaches to design took up much more time this time around than I expected it to. I finally had to take a step back and put pen to paper. Novel idea, right? Actually do sketches for something like this? Now, I typically do these kind of things with any other design. I’m very much for the hand-drawn and fine art aspect when it comes to graphic design. However, for some reason with Interactive Design I have trouble combining the two. Once I finally took a step back and looked at the bigger picture and let myself go through the process that was at hand, I feel like I was finally able to get a hold on what I could do. After finishing this project I can confidentially say that I did worlds better then the first one. It was so much easier for me to get a hold on how to do this, how to make the sizes right and how to make everything work together. I also love branding, so the idea of getting to start from scratch helped me out with wanting to be passionate about this project as a whole. Also, after completing this project I am even more excited for the next one. I can’t wait to let myself continue to grow. At the start of this class I thought there was no way I would ever enjoy any project in this class. From the start of being a designer I swore off interactive design, simply because I hated it and felt it was too simple. Well, I got slapped in the face. I’m actually learning how to enjoy this and how to push myself in new ways.