Archive for ‘Reflection (P3)’

I enjoyed this project however I did have some confusion of all the details we needed to add to the blog site. The first time I started my homepage I didn’t realize that it normally has recent blogs on the homepage that can look similar to the blog page. The first comp I made looked more like an ‘about page’ rather than a homepage for a blog. I think I improved on my blog actually looking more like a webpage but with crafty visual elements. I think I improved on the feel of a website but I think I need to improve on my website designs to look more professional.

I don’t think I struggled with more with technical mistakes for this project than the last projects. I figured out to bring in the webpage jpg into Photoshop and using that at the correct size as my webpage. I also was able to use grids better since the webpage was the right size. I think the technical complications I had was possibly spacing but I tried to space out the best as possible but it’s not perfect.

I think one of the struggles I have is making my websites look more professional. I think I presented a lot of visual elements into my blog pages and similar blue colors that looks somewhat intermediate work. I think I need more color themes and possibly less visual elements to make the page look more professional like it belongs on a website.  I think with my webpages would look better with another color and not all the blue colors.

I think a strength in this project is that it looks visually pleasing like a blog should look like and the layout of the webpages fit well. I think a strength was having all the elements on the pages that were needed on a blog. It was too bad I missed the critique but I feel like a critique would help out improving my page to look more professional.

I really enjoyed this project. Blogs are one of the most commonly used formats on the web and i use them constantly, the decision to create a typography blog was an obvious one to me. Its something that I am most familiar with viewing but this project has definetly changed my perspective on their functionality and how delicate the hierarchy and layout of a blog can be. Overall I think my idea was much stronger with this project and the process work helped enormously in formulating that idea. For this project specifically I decided to focus more on my preliminary drawings, which I am increasingly learning more and more that the process is vital to producing a good quality website. On this project I still struggled with finessing the fine details that really made the hierarchy work. Although i feel my design solution was functional and pleasing to look at, I think next time I will approach the initial concept and try to find as many diverse and dynamic solutions as possible. I believe my websites have been lacking a sense of originality and i hope to change that in the future. As far as techinical difficulties it is still takes me quite some time to do work on photoshop and im hoping i can add some more three dimensionality to my work which i feel it is lacking. Overall i really enjoyed this assignment and i find interactive design to be quite a challenge, but also something i would like to continue to improve on. I find that my work tends to use a strick adherance to the grid, while sometime this can be very positive, but i really want to push back the grid. Use it without it dominating the design which is definitely something that can increase the quality of the design.

At the beginning of this assignment I felt like I had no idea what was going on. It was frustrating for my domain name to fail to work for the first few classes and I felt so behind the entire time. I could have had the mindset that I won’t catch up, but I didn’t allow myself to think that way and kept truckin’. That being my motivational story, I’ll  move on.

I can see improvement on my treatment of hierarchy and am feeling more confident in that. I feel that, that leaves more room to focus on other details, which was exciting. I realized that the other details was more hierarchy that I hadn’t addressed in previous posts. I hope that I utilized space more successfully. I did see some areas on my archival page that I should have worked on further. I still need to produce more sketches and add more content to my wireframe. I forget how important this preliminary work is and that could really hurt me at some point. I felt like I could have done better with the headers, but it allowed me to play with a new element. I don’t regret going with that element, but it’s definitely something I want to improve upon. I would also work on my elements such as icons. I think that I’ve improved on them, but I want to continue to find more solutions. I think that I can always improve on type treatment, but I branched out some more on this project. I hope my eye for typography continues to sharpen.

My fragments have improved x10. I think I may have put too much thought into them, but it really helped me visualize what the whole blog could look like. I found that incredibly helpful. I think my website looked more finished than in the previous projects. I suppose that means I keep improving, which is quite encouraging. I hope nothing slows me down for this next project, like a milkshake spill or new technology to me, but life happens. It’s been interesting to see how things turn out. I enjoyed creating these pages; I can definitely see myself making so many more different layouts.

With this project, as with all the projects beforehand, my biggest problems stemmed from using Photoshop. The medium is still difficult for me to design with, and though I can definitely see myself improving, I still would not say that I am entirely proficient. That said, I have started to love the nuances of designing in Photoshop, as opposed to Illustrator or inDesign. Photoshop allows me to be extremely detail oriented, and I can easily lose hours adjusting opacity, changing colors, adding shadows, ect.

With this project, one of my initial design problems was using too much reversed-out text. I went into this assignment with a dark color scheme in mind, and started with all my body copy white-on-dark, not realizing the eye strain that much reversed out type could create. My biggest issue after that was using a lighter background color on my dark themed site. I tried a number of variants, and ended up matching the color of my white(er) heading text. I was afraid that the sudden large area of white on dark would draw too much attention, but once it was matched up with images and copy, it all evened out fairly nicely.

Another issue I had was finding a balance between text and images, especially on my main page. I wanted the main page to catch the eye, as it’s the first thing a viewer would see, and really determines whether they view the site or not. My initial design was primarily text, as I imagined a blog had to look. I was stuck on blog themes stemming from Blogspot that were text heavy and image light. After reviewing my inspiration and broadening my mind on what a blog can actually entail, I allowed a lot more images into my site, helping the overall look and feel tremendously. I even went so far as to hide most of the body copy on the first page, only revealing it over a mouse hover-over.

Perhaps my biggest concern with this assignment, and with all the assignments before it, is how difficult it was for me to initially approach the project; and I know exactly why that is: sketches, fragments and wireframes. I always see the huge importance of those pieces after the fact, and then approach the following project the same way, tackling the main project on it’s own, only after I have a single idea in my head. It’s bad design, and leads to a lack of creativity, and I need to stop it. So I will!

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.

This project was not as daunting of a challenge for me as the last one, but I still suffered from several problems that hindered my final output.

In terms of progress, I believe I am getting much better at manipulating Photoshop and keeping things logically organized. This project required the greatest number of folders and layers so far, but I kept a pretty good handle on it throughout the process. I am also improving marginally in maintaining a consistent style or tone in my work, I think. From previous assignments I can see improvement during the process when developing different directions for elements. Even though they weren’t radically different, I think they were better than the directions from the last project.

Conceptually I am still having trouble breaking the traditional mold of how certain sites should look, and tend to stick to the confines of what encompasses a traditional blog or restaurant site. I still need to improve on the process, and finishing sketches before working on elements or rough compositions. I feel that if these things come first, I will be ultimately more happy with the end results.

This last project was probably one of the smoothest so far. I don’t know if it is because it had less content or the whole interactive design is just becoming more natural (hopefully the latter). I should probably actually take time to sketch more for the next project as well. It probably would have gone a lot faster had I had something to look back refer to. I noticed I am still having issues with hierarchy and allowing content to be too vibrant or too dull. However, I am starting to pick up on using colour to show importance as well as weight and size.
The main issue I kept running into with this project was my complete and lack of knowledge regarding blogs. I had to keep referring to the project intro page to ensure I was using all the correct terms and all terms necessary. I also had to continuously search what terms meant and refer to inspiration and other blogs to get a feel of how one should look. I noticed the style is quite a bit different than others in the class so I don’t quite know if I hit it or not. I still think it looks pretty cool regardless.
As I mentioned before, this project seemed to go a lot smoother and faster than previous. I have continued to learn short cuts and advance my skills on photoshop. The program is becoming a lot more enjoyable.  I also actually completed a wireframe and all fragments this time which made the overall layout go a lot smoother and quicker. Surprising how much that actually helps!
I think I am getting better at placement and overall layout. I think my legibility and overall clarity has increased/improved. One major improvement is how much I actually enjoyed this project. I think a lot of it came from the originality and creating icons and other fun things.
I just need to continue working on my hierarchy and visual language. I think I still need to grasp that line between a loud background and an effective background. I should also learn how to actually sketch thoroughly and before the project is done.

I think this project was one of the most difficult ones yet, mostly because it was so open ended. The name of the website, the target audience, the subject matter and the look were completely open ended, and that was very difficult for me to find a starting point for. As per usual I procrastinated way too long on this project as well, so I didn’t get any constructive feedback about my direction, which definitely hurts the learning process. I also noticed that I used the grid structure to format the site, and I used it for all my tool bars and headers and footers and such, but didn’t rely on it much at all when formatting the text. Another problem I face (which I put myself into) was my direction. I’ve seen soooo many boring blogs out there that just have information on the screen in a very boring way and they don’t hold my attention, so of course I decided to try something I haven’t seen as much of, and went with the bulletin board approach. My initial idea was to create an extremely user friendly site, in which the user could practically drag and drop whatever posts they wanted, wherever they wanted, almost like rearranging magnets on a fridge, or placing sticky notes in whatever order they wanted to. The other challenge I faced was executing this idea in an artistic, fresh looking manner. Like I said, I get so tired of all the blogs out there that look like a businessman with Microsoft Excel made them, so I wanted mine to have a kind of fresh, young looking feel to it. It was later that I actually decided to use my own art works and stories for the pages, mostly because I couldn’t think of a better client to create for, hence the name “Totally Randumb”. That is exhibit A of my lack of creativity. To wrap things up, I liked this project because it made me solve a lot of things for myself instead of just being told who to create for, but it was that same open-endedness and my lack of a creative idea that hindered me from creating something better.

I really liked this project and had a lot of fun doing it, but there were some things i noticed along the way that I want to comment about! The first off being that I still have some slight spacing issues that i noticed when we were looking at the finals, these can be sen mostly on the story page. It isn’t anything hugely noticeable but I saw it and now that little technical mistake really bothers me.

Conceptually I rushed into one of my first ideas, which I still think turned out well and I really like it, but then as I was doing some of my sketches after the fact I came across two or three more ideas that would have been brilliant for a blog type website. So I would say that my big weakness conceptually was rushing forward without taking the proper time on my process. I really am pleased with my website and think that it is the best one that I have put out so far but it kills me to thinking about if it could have been better with some of my other ideas.

As far as over all improvement goes I have noticed me increased attention to detail and keenness to noticed subtlety, (which doesn’t mean the I necessarily accomplished it) I think that the subtle choice of colors and type really benefited me in this project. This can definitely be seen in my heading and body copy and alignment when compared to previous posts. I really like the way I handled the archive page and think that it is one of my strongest showings in a web design project thus far in the class. Overall I am very pleased with the site, but I know that it still can use some work and tweaks here and there, it’s by no means perfect.

I also could afford to improve on my process, like I stated before I don’t know how it would have turned out but I would like to think that if I would have done my process in the intended order that i could have come out with some awesome layouts and designs. Not doing the process in the logical order is kind of killing my potential projects.

The blog was a challenge because the pages are all so similar, but different. They have to have the same feel and layout in order to make sense, but the levels of hierarchy on each page changed. This project had a lot of type arrangement and that was difficult sometimes to figure out the hierarchy and to make it the correct size and readable, although I think this time it was much easier to find a solution than on previous assignments. I think one area that coule be worked on more for me would be the hierarchy in the post title and date. The fonts I chose limited my choices, such as the thing I wanted to be higher did not have any bold or italic. Looking at it now I think the date could be even smaller than I made it so that the title would stand out more, and even maybe change the order. One page that I think is very readable and useable is the single post page with the comments at the bottom. I struggled to make the comments stand out from the submission boxes, and also so that it was not so heavy of a color that it brought your eye down to it immediately. I looked at a lot of other popular blogs and used a similar layout and I believe it reads well, with the exception of a little bit of spacing issue with the posters name and the date. I feel as if the home page is clear and it would be easy to see what interests me and to click on a post and go on to the post page. The clipped image is not too big but not too small, to where you can see a preview and it draws you in, which I think is the purpose of the blog. The archive page was difficult, and I think if I could do it differently I would make it slightly different from the other two pages, maybe with month and year and then it would continue onto posts from that month or year. This page was for categories (or tags) and I think it clearly tells you what has been placed in that category. I enjoyed this project and I would really like to make this blog real and connect it to my portfolio sometime in the future.