Monday 4 January 2016

OUGD504 Design Production & Evaluation (Studio Brief Four)

Design Production

To produce a website, it's beneficial to create wireframes before going on to create the actual website. This saves a lot of time when showing the concept and layout to a client, as the client can get a rough idea of how to website will look and can tell you if they think they will be happy with the design or not. It is also beneficial as the web developer can tell you from looking at wireframes whether the website will be possible to create or not.

The web developer will require the size of the fonts used to create the website. For my design, I used the typeface Futura Condensed, as this is the typeface used on CryBabyCry's album cover. The font sizes I used were 36 and 60.

H1 size font = 60
H6 size font = 36

The developer will also require the colour codes and swatches used on the website. For my website, I used the following colour swatches.


Finally, to make coding the website easier for the developer, it helps to have a very ordered layers palette on Photoshop, as this means that finding each layer is made a lot easier. It helps to label things - such as body copy, title, logo, navigation bar etc. This is what my Photoshop document of the homepage looks like.




Evaluation

As a whole, this brief went really successfully. I made the correct choice in changing my chosen artist half way through the brief, as it wasn't going too well and I think this band went a lot more successfully. This was down to the fact that I couldn't of replicated Grimes' album artwork myself, and therefore the best idea I had was close to impossible. I did, however, enjoy using film to record scribbles. My time management for this brief was successful after the first critique, however before that I struggled as my ideas weren't too great. However, once I had found a concept for Cry Baby Cry I found this project really enjoyable and fun to do.

I particularly enjoyed creating the About page for the website, as I haven't used a lot of the skills that I have within Photoshop for a long time and I got the opportunity to experiment and utilise the skills that I have to create one striking image using three photographs. I thought it was really fun considering what I would desire from a bands website and trying to recreate my own ideas using my own design skills.

A weakness of this project was picking an artist, as I decided to change to Cry Baby Cry half way through the brief, meaning I had a lot less time than most people had on the project, however I worked really hard over Christmas to catch up with the amount of work (and quality of work!). It would've been nice, however, to create the website using the software 'JustInMind', however I had already used the free trial a couple of years ago, and therefore the software was very limiting to use.

A strength of this project was the concept of getting more users to visit the website, as I think my ideas are really strong (Exclusive discount for users and the video streaming idea). I also think a strength of this project was my actual design work, as I tried to keep the design very clean and minimal as the bands album artwork has a focus on negative space and geometric shapes, and I believe I achieved this as on each platform there is a great focus on negative space around the content.

Another strength of this project was my time management, as once I had chosen an artist, I worked to a very tight schedule to make sure that I got a solid design for each device. If I had more time (and money), I would've liked to extend my trial to JustInMind and create an actual working website. I think it would've been really interesting to see the website operating, and it also would've been really great to send the website to the band and see what their thoughts are.

No comments:

Post a Comment