I am having a hard time coming up with ideas for my website. Vans already has a timeline on their website and it is one of the most boring, typical things I have ever seen. My main goal for my site is to really do Vans justice as a brand, but also show their history in an innovative, interesting way while remaining true to what the brand stands for. I am not going to touch the computer until I come up with a ton of potential sketches that feel good. I would really like to try doing something similar to the tile thing Colleen showed us in class, but I also want to be able to code my website, and I am not very confident about my coding abilities at this point. Oh well.
Jake Headid
The new project seems like it should be pretty cool and I am really happy that Colleen decided to leave it open. No one sounded very enthused when we were trying to come up with an outline for the project, and I think everyone kind of just wanted to do their own thing anyway. When Colleen told us we would be telling a story or a timeline of some sort I knew immediately that I wanted to do the history of Vans. Vans is celebrating there 50th anniversary this year and I have done some projects based on them in the past, so I thought it would be really fun to create a website honoring their history as the first company to base their business off of action sports.
We are to begin wireframing how our site would work without worrying about all the little details and design elements. This sort of thing is always hard for me because I live for getting to the outcome, so seeing things in a stage like wireframes is kind of difficult for me. That being said, I know how helpful it is to approach something this way so I am just going to do my best at focusing on the framework for the site.
After critting our navigation systems, there are some things on mine I would like to change. The changed are pretty minor and wont be very difficult or take too long to make. I didnt get too much feedback from the class but Colleen offered lots of ideas, and also mentioned some things she thought was working well in my design. I am glad she mentioned liking the thought I put into the way everything would move because that was one of the main areas of focus for my navigation. I am really intrigued by interactive designs that move and interact with each other and I wanted my designs to reflect that.
On a side note, it was also cool to see what everyone else had come up with because up until this point I really hadnt seen what everyone else is doing. I always think its cool to see what everyone comes up with when issued the same challenge with the same set of information. There were some concepts that were relatively similar but no two designs were the same.
I am finally wrapping things up with my navigation system and I think it is turning out alright. I am making sure to have a lot of screens to show so it is easy for people to understand how my system would work. I am going to mock up my design on to Mac screens so it feels more like you are using the interface and not just looking at print outs of what I came up with. One thing I know that is going to be mentioned is the typography, as I mentioned in a previous post I sometimes struggle with handling type and it is difficult to set a lot of type in a circle and have it look right.
Moving forward with the navigation system is going alright. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, and I dont think it will be too hard to make it happen. One thing that is difficult when designing a navigation like this, is you have to consider every single outcome or possibility to know that your design would actually work. I am struggling with finding a color palette that I feel works well with my concept. This isnt much of a surprise though as I generally struggle with color and end up using colors I do all the time. I am making it a point to not use my typical palette this time though.
While coding my website I am glad I opted to use the model as a template to sort of work from. I tried doing one myself and it was much messier and I really dont know what I am doing when it comes to the width and padding of things. I am still hasty about moving on to certain things in my website though, as I really am unsure of how to do a lot of things.
I dont really have too many cool ideas for the navigation system but I have a concept that I think I am going to go with. The concept is fairly simple because there is so much information that links together in some way so I wanted my navigation to remain easy to use.
Having to make connections between all of the T’s was really hard. I wasnt very focused on everyone elses T’s so it was difficult for me to categorize a lot of the names. The terms and technologies were easier to categorize because they are more like definitions. I’ve never had to design a complex navigation system before so I feel like I am struggling to come up with an idea that is original and would actually organize the T’s in the correct way. It is always nice when Colleen shows us examples of good original designs because it gets me thinking in a more creative way.
So I got the html all set up to start coding my website. And surprisingly I did it right! It really wasnt too bad to figure out, and it makes me feel way better about what I thought I know and dont know. Class the other day turned out to be more helpful than I thought and was a good exercise to really break down the format of writing the html. This makes me feel a little bit more confident moving in to figuring out the CSS code.
Today we had to try and write out the html for our websites and it went about as well as I thought it was going to for me, not very well. My group wasn’t really sure and we had some disagreements about things so that didnt make it much easier. Code Academy makes it so easy because they set you up to complete the challenge, however I knew it was going to be much harder to actually do it without something prompting me to do the correct things. I took this a fail and am going to be re-reading the chapters to hopefully make more sense of some things. I know it will come in time, but as of right now I am super lost.
For the mini crit I was as prepared as I had wanted to be because I kind of misunderstood the directions. The whole time we were designing I didn’t know we were supposed to be making the T’s in a cohesive design like a website because the outline just said to typeset and design on 8.5×11. But after seeing that I clearly wasn’t right, I had to go back redesign all of my spreads to be cohesive, which I was sort of doing anyways as you read in the previous blog post. I am like the direction I am taking for it, and I am trying to keep in mind that I will have to code it so I’m trying to keep in semi simple.