Colour Scheme

I found a good little tool on colour schemes, it is very handy on choosing colours for my design draft. Though I have to be a little careful not to completely trust colours spat out by a program. I am thinking of doing a dark grey/black/dark blue colour scheme for my resdesign.

Design Reference

The five websites that I have chosen for this design reference are similar in design and content. All the websites are websites for web designing companies in Australia, the US and Canada. They have basically the same layout and I plan to replicate these designs for the Stonefest website.

All websites are centred

All the websites that I am using have their design smack bang in the middle of the page. I personally think this is the best way to go about designing a website because if the page is on the left or right then there is a big amount of space just wasted on the opposite side. I plan to do this for the main project.

Logo

All five websites have their logo in the top left corner of the site. The logos are simple (the name of the company with a minor adjustment) yet effective and create a visual reference for the site. The logo also acts as a link back to the home page as it common nowadays in website designing (Site ID). I plan to create a new logo for the Stonefest site but my image building skill is pretty low so I might just stick with these examples and create a simple logo.

Navigation bar

The navigation bar is at the top right corner of the design for every site. I think this is a good thing as its obvious that they are links, its one of the first things you see when the site pops up and its very hard to get lost on the site. Obviously being a website building company the links are very similar (home, services, portfolio, pricing, contact) between the sites. Once again I will be following these designs and placing the navigation bar alongside the logo.

Design flow

All the sites have the same design pattern or flow. The logo and the navigation bar are at the top of the page, the next section outlines what the company specialises in, followed by the services in more detail.

Impact of designs

When I first viewed the five websites I was impressed by the website visually. The websites seemed to jump out at me; make an impact on me. The designs are visually pleasing; they are easy to read and navigate through and there are no bright colours that hurt your eyes, they all match well. The designs are “big” (for lack of a better term) and seem to “come to you” (once again for lack of a better term).

Simple design

The designs for the sites are relatively simple with the data being split into 2 or 3 rows. I can imagine the designers sitting down and working on a grid layout in the early design process. Also on the home pages of each site they don’t try to throw impossible amounts of information at you, that’s what the other pages explore.

Page names

All the websites have simple and accurate page names for each page in the website except for one site; Oh! Media. Their headers for the page names are like a little riddle but they still describe the page details e.g. for their portfolio page their header is “Let our work speak for itself” and the contact page reads “Give us a shout!” I personally don’t think this is a problem, maybe the company didn’t want to seem too boring or wanted to show they had had a personality or just wanted to spruce things up a bit.

One interesting thing to note about the sites is that none of them have a search function. In Krug’s “Trunk Test” he says every site should have a search function in case they can’t find what they’re looking for but I disagree with him on this point in relation to these five sites. For these sites I don’t think there needs to be a search function as all the information is easy to find.

(For some reason only 3 of the 5 screenshots are showing at the top of the post)

Websites in order are Koves, Adrenalin Media, Oh! Media, Mooty Web Design, Lifetree Creative

Changing website

I have changed my mind about which website I will redesign for the project. Instead of doing the Canberra International Music Festival I have decided to do Stonefest instead as I think it will suit my intended design better.

Website Assignment

At the moment I think I will re-design the Canberra Music Festival website as I think it is the one website out of the three that needs an overhaul. So hopefully I can make it into a decent looking website.

Web Design and Production

Gday. Last year I had the same blog for the Networked Media Production unit and I didnt see the point in making a new one for this unit, so Ill just use the same one. Looking forward to what the unit will teach me.

Reflection Post

I have learned a few things from not only my blog but blogs from all over the internet. They are a quick and easy way of publishing information about anything, any content you want. It greatly benefits me as there are so many blogs about web design and the web in general. Through my blog roll and rss feeds, it is easy for me to be up to date with the latest happenings about web design, content and structure. Also from my blog roll I can check other students blogs and news from the unit website, which is very handy.

I have customised my blog by adding rss feeds from many different sites; web design advice, the unit web site, other students blogs and the latest headlines from fox sports. I changed the design and layout a couple of times as I found with this layout I can have more rss feeds without disrupting the actual content of my blog.

3 nominated posts:

Number 1

Number 2

Number 3

Final Assignment

TV time watched between me and my brother.

I created all the graphs with the Google chart maker with the exception of the first one, the social life one. This one graph gave me some grief as in Google docs you couldn’t make a graph that went out both ways, the data could only go out to the right. So I had to make two separate graphs in excel and put them together to get it to the way I wanted it, hence the reason why the data has negative values on the left.

The pie graph should have had numeric values attached to it but it doesn’t and I don’t know why. The blue part represents 13 hours while the lighter part represents the total of 40 hours. I had to calulate the numbers adding to 100 as that’s how pie graphs work.

I based the layout of the data visualisation on the Daytum website and the Feltron’s annual report. I wasn’t sure how to actually present the work so I just did it in a word document, that way anyone can access it without having to sign up for an account on a website.

I thought it might’ve been a bit funny to show the comparison between the hours of sport we both play…though I don’t know if it worked or not.

At the bottom of the document I explained the graphs, charts and numbers. I thought it was a good way of displaying the logic behind the factors that influence the amount of television we watch.

Production Project B

Haven’t updated in a few days so I thought I better give my plan for the second assignment. Ive decided to do the data visualisation one and have picked a pretty boring topic: me versus me brother in tv time, who watches the most tv in a week. Ive split it up into a few factors that influence how many hours we both watch: social, uni, work & sport. On top of that there was injury rehab but I decided to scrap that as we spent the same amount of time on our respective injuries. I plan to put some of the data on the same graphs to show the comparison between us. More later

Week 12 Tutorial

This week Nathan taught us about mashups and APIs and showed us a few examples. Its a smart idea how these sites work, how you don’t actually have to go to flickr (or a site like it) to access the data and pictures. The Wolfenflickr site was pretty clever I thought and a good way to show how you can access the data without accessing the site. The Retrivr site is amazing, how the program can pick up photos by the resemblance to the drawing and colours is remarkable. With these new websites coming out, it opens a whole new option for viewing content which could be very important in the near future.

Week 11 Tutorial

This week Nathan explained to us what a data visualisation is. Basically it is a set of data in picture form (pie graph, any kind of graph or image representing numbers). This helped me as I did not know what one was before today so it makes the second assignment decision easier. He showed us examples of some sites which were pretty amazing and a bit sad really (especially that one with the annual report on himself -> does he really expect people to take an interest in what he does how many times?). The We Feel Fine and the Gapminder, on the other hand were pretty cool and quite interesting to look at…I wonder how much effort went into those 2 sites. At this stage I might do the data visualisation assignment…