Critique: Aftermath

The outcome of the website could have been better. Lightbox may have been a bit overused, but I feel the design itself is good. I will probably in the near future revamp the layout without a fireworks slice dependency. I am still more satisfied with this layout though then the previous.

Website Rationale

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Digital and Experimental Media
Website Rationale

In the beginning of the process of designing my website, I solely focused on the aesthetic presence of it. The idea was to make an interface that reflected my personality as a designer.  My first batch of templates did not seem to fit the scheme. Although some were aesthetically pleasing, they each lacked an element to complete my ideal design.

The first template I made, to my surprise, had really positive feedbacks. There were some portions of the pages that could’ve been fixed, such as the thumbnail sizes that appeared a bit too long; however, I scratched this template because initially it felt it advertised me excessively as an illustrator. On my second template, my design emphasis fell on the information of the site, and as a result it felt like a corporate blog template.

The third, fourth and fifth templates were variants of the same design. To be honest, it seem like I was stuck on this seesaw of providing clean information or maintaining an aesthetic presence. As a result, I took a break from the project due to unexpected illness and a bit of frustration.

Coming back to it a few weeks later, I combined my targeted goals and started from scratch again. When returning to my research and wireframes, I discovered that by combining the “contact” and “about me” pages I could save the user from having to browse further to find more information. A self-brief was developed to make a site in which a user would not have to click more than two or three times and provide a template for easy updating.  To fit in with this design concept, lightbox was utilized and further explored to allow images that were not displayed on the page to appear as part a collection when clicking on a thumbnail. Consequently, the html coding for most of the images on the site are actually hidden within “a href” tags that are not attached to any viewable object.

Other design elements of my final layout include a grey and black tone finish with colour rollovers. The reason I chose this was to make each thumbnail a focal point upon interaction from the rest of the site.  

Layout Images

The idea is to have the user to find my work or anything in a maximum amount of two clicks. I also combined the about me and contact me into one page, as I feel dedicating a page for contact information is a bit redundant and may be a bit frustrating for the user.

Folio template:

About / Contact Me template

Wire frames and flowchart for new layout

I wasn't entirely pleased with the layouts of my site. Something cleaner would be more ideal for me.
Here's the the wire frame and flowchart for the new layout.

Experimenting with Light & Type

I saw a concept for type that Lee was experimenting with (click on his link!), so I decided to adopt it for experimental purposes.

Animation - a new challenge

I have been dissecting my ant into various limbs to be able to animate it. I will let you know if I am successful sometime in the near future. In the meantime, here's a preview: