Honestly, I am horrible at doing a process for a lot of things. When doing just a logo, I find it easy. Make a word list...sketch out the ideas (no matter how horrible I am at sketching)...and take it to the computer. With animation (the little bit that I've done), I will sit there and sketch out some key frames, characters, etc. But with websites...that's a whole other story.
Sketches? Wireframes? Oh no! I'm one of those people that likes to get an idea in their head, sit down, and fiddle with the idea straight on the computer. Often times, things get scrapped. But then I have a backbone for a possible future project, or at least something to show people. I never delete my scrapped work for that reason.
I'm not saying process is bad. Oh, quite the contrary. I am sure if I could get used to it I'd have a grand old time sketching out my ideas. But as someone who has done almost ALL her artwork digitally, it's almost intimidating. I know the sketches are just for ideation...but there's something about me that when i sit down with a pencil and paper, I better have an eraser handy. There's also just something about working in full color instead of just sketches...
As for audience, it's difficult to think of your audience when you are creating the whole concept and everything. I know who my main audience is on my personal sites...If I were to have a client they'd generally have an audience in mind as well. But when you have to decide for yourself, that's where it gets tricky.
With the film festival website it's especially difficult. If your film festival is general, then your site should be for the general public too. Then you get the dilemma I'm having. Having a general audience opens up a full can of design possibilities. But then there's also the fact that you can't please everyone. I can't see a design being liked by everyone of all ages...so instead I had to think further in to it.
If this is a family friendly festival, who is most likely going to be looking at the site? Parents perhaps, who want to SEE that it's a kid-friendly event. So it should be friendly as well. Maybe there is a teen who wants their parents to take them to the festival because they are in to that type of thing...so the site should be enticing for that age group. Trendy perhaps. Maybe college students who take interest in film or even just the arts in general.
I think when it comes to older people (50-60+), they might not be going for the festival itself, but to see a specific movie. So maybe the website won't matter so much to them (not to mention many people this age still aren't using computers as their source of information...they may appreciate a pamphlet instead).
It's sometimes difficult to design for all ages and still make it fun to look at for everyone. You don't want to make something completely boring (as I've seen many actual festival sites are...low budget doesn't mean it has to be bland!).
Again, I have this issue that I just NEED to make things at least have a little something for higher resolutions, so I usually do that in the form of a background image that continues on. There's not many people that use 800x600 anymore, so I do not want to limit a website to only looking good on that!
Design 1
A fun, floaty version that has plenty of space for information, clear navigation, and a clean feel. The boat stays above the page you are on. It's a marker! A friend actually helped me a little with the concept on this, especially the suggestion of using a boat in some fashion on the header (while I came up with the use of it as a marker, and she loved it). I am hoping this design isn't too girly. I was also very hesitant to use blue...but with the big emphasis on showing films across the water, I feel it can't be helped. At least this isn't SUPERMAN BLUE like my GoTV site.
Design 2
I didn't want to do a dark layout this time, but I LOOOOVE charcoal grey. So to compromise I just made the background dark and kept the content light with bold colors. I wanted to do something a bit grungy so this is the attempt. I couldn't get away from using those film strips. It gave so much more character than plain black stripes. I also for some reason (on both of these) had a great urge to use the Georgia font in places to contrast with my always using Verdana. The other font used in the logo and other buttons (again on both) is Berlin Sans.
Design 3
Blaaahhhh! This one was a bit bland for my taste once I got the content in. Oh well. Sometimes we make things we hate. Not really made for a large screen this time. Maybe that's why I don't like it!
Design 4 a/b
I think this was my favorite...and it was just an experiment! Okay, so again, I'm not diggin the blue...so I'm walking to class and I think "Oh, why not a skyline of Seattle?" I had a hard time finding an image that would be usable. After all...Seattle is so gray...all the time. So I had to fabricate the image a bit. I used a stock photo (ONOEZ) for Seattle in the day time, and a sunset photo and attempted to make a somewhat believable sunset. So I am probably going to do the sunset version of this one for my final :) It should be fun.
Seriously? I didn't find any information leading to this name being taken. Excuse me for my lame and cliche name, but I have some reason for it. Washington has the largest ferry system in the nation. WSF is the main sponsor of this event.
Concept: A general international film festival containing several genre's and awards. The catch comes at the venues. It promotes use of the main transportation system around the Sound and gives some tourism to a somewhat smaller area.
Venues: Several places in Seattle and Bremerton. With a paid ticket to the festival, you gain free access to a special ferry boat that travels between the two towns. Short films will be shown on the rides over and back.
Audience: While the genres are fairly broad, because of the location many Northwest film makers submit films to the festival. Because of this there would likely be many nature-friendly films which may attract a younger "green" audience (younger, as in young adult-middle aged). However, this will be a family friendly environment so all ages are welcome.
For the website, because it is an event based for family fun, should be fun itself, but still somewhat professional. Many Film Festival websites seem very bland. Let us raise the bar, at least a little bit.
The website will of course give information about the festival itself and the films, but it will also contain a section talking about the culture of the area, and highlight other things worth seeing around the area.
While I realize these are meant to be designed for a 1024 screen, I also wanted to make them somewhat snazzy for larger screens too. Anyway, here are the original three, minus the secondary pages since they aren't TOO much different. I really wanted to make 3 very different designs. So here we go.
Design 1
Well this is pretty much different than anything I've done before, but highly inspired by my personal blog's prototype. I wanted something a little chaotic, but not overly so. Something that could be enjoyed by the younger audience, but still be organized in a way that people could find things. Unfortunately I REALLY hate the navigation. I had no idea what to do with it. Also it still seemed so cluttered.
Design 2
A much different approach. I was told it looked too much like a news site. Well, thank you, that's what I was going for. It also apparently resembles Apple, which I guess in a way I was going for, though not apple specifically. I wanted to do something that used the trendy "I'm shiny like Vista!" Does the cliche eye candy make you hungry? Well, okay. In all honesty this design is far from my favorite. Perhaps because it is so boxed in, which I have gotten overly used to over the years.
Design 3
At this point I have wiped my brain clean of any ideas I had previously conceived. Why? They were crap, much like the last layout. I still wanted something simple, but something that had a little fluidity. I decided to go for solid colors. Friendly, functional, and doesn't kill bandwidth. I also went with tabs for the navigation which I love. This turned out to be my favorite layout of the three. But we aren't done yet...
The Reworking
Due to popular demand, I decided to work on the first one again for my final design. But because I loved my third one so much I just couldn't let it go. So, naturally, 1+3=4. I got to keep my tabs (yay) and kept the blue background that people seemed to like. I'm pretty happy with this, though it's going to be a pain in the butt to code. Oh well. If it weren't a challenge it would do me no good!
Ah the joys of ambiguity. When coming to Western as a transfer student, I was quite unsure of what the heck I was going to be doing. I didn't come from a large design-class background. I took a couple classes in high school, and the more basic art classes in community college. But never had I heard the term "new media". I was scared and confused! "What concentration should I take? What would I be studying if I joined New Media?"
I have aspired to be a web designer for a long time, but have also been confused on whether I wanted to be coding websites or designing them. All I could come up with was the answer of "a little of both". Then came the question that seems to be on everyone's mind when it comes to this program..."Am I going to learn to code or not?" Luckily in this program, the answer was actually both. Learning the basics of XHTML is great, even if you don't want to code websites int he future it's a good tool to have on your utility belt. As a DESIGNER you really don't need to know anything advanced, but it helps to have those basics so you can help out if needed.
While some of us want to know the more advanced coding languages, such as PHP, AJAX, etc., it is really not a necessity for our likely future jobs. If you do learn it on your own, hey that's awesome! You have more open doors. The unfortunate part is you may end up not getting to do much of the design part that you love so much. I personally would love to learn this stuff. I am slowly learning it on my own, but really for personal reasons. Even though I enjoy the occasional coding, I think doing it for my own sites is quite enough!
But more to the point..."new media." What a horrible term. Much of what we are doing IS new, because the technology changes so much. But it's basics do not change. It also depends on your views of what "new" is. The first crappy website I made was AT LEAST 8 years ago. Is web design really new anymore? What about video? Sound? None of this is new...it is just evolving. I agree that the term "Interactive" or "Communication" or heck, even just plain "Digital" would be a better term than new. We're not designing holograms or anything (not yet!). The mediums we are presenting on are not so new (with the exception of mobile technology)...just getting better quality.
Oi, I need to learn not to write mini-essays.
I know some people have been asking how to get their sites on the web. The first step is getting hosting.
There are a few different types of hosting, which range from free to quite expensive.
Free hosts I usually do not recommend. On those that I've tried in the past, the servers are generally slow, require that you put ads on your page, and are very limited on the type of stuff you can do. If you're not interested in php scripts (forums, wordpress blogs, etc), and dont care about ads, then it probably wouldn't matter for you. Because I haven't used free hosts in a loooong while, I can't really recommend any specific ones.
The type I recommend is not so cheap, but it's worth it. Hosting from places like Dreamhost and 1and1 actually are not bad for the price you pay. They provide lots of space, database hosting, mail service and more. When I signed up for Dreamhost 2 years ago I payed a promotional price of $22 for the first year with 1 free domain. We now pay $120 per year for hosting, plus $10 each for the 6 domains we own (and we can register more any time we want). We use only a tiny fraction of what's offered to us (5/650GB space and about 50GB/8TB bandwidth per month). And now they are offering us UNLIMITED space! Hah, like we need it...but why not take it anyway?! It's definitely been worth it.
So that's my suggestion. Sure you have hosting now through the school, but that's going to be gone soon. Free hosting is nice because it's free...but you definitely don't have as much freedom unless you pay!
This is a work in progress...I've recently reformatted BOTH of my computers so I need to dig up my favorites off my hard drives.
There are a lot of amazing informational and resource sites out there. Here are some of the ones I like to keep up with. I know a lot of you have probably heard of some of these before or probably even use them...but not all of us do, so whatever.
http://psdtuts.com/
http://nettuts.com/
http://vectortuts.com/
-The *tuts sites have some great links to tutorials and free resources they find out on the web. They also have an audio site, but I've never really looked at it.
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
-Trends and tutorials. Need I say more? Their trends section is great for inspiration.
http://www.brusheezy.com/
http://www.vecteezy.com/
http://www.flasheezy.com/
-Full of free brushes, vectors, and flash files. While they don't really have much for quantity, especially on Flasheezy, they do have *some* nice stuff.
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
-I haven't been to this place in a long time actually, but when I was starting to do web stuff I used it a lot. Lots of web scripts (javascript/dhtml)...some bad ones, some great ones. If nothing else you can learn from them. Keep in mind not all of these are cross-browser compatible...
The Web Design Survey 2007 brought many surprises indeed. It's very interesting to see the field in numbers. While it obviously doesn't show the whole world of web design, it at least gives a general idea. It's likely a pretty accurate representation, at least if the survey was random.
I was quite surprised at the amount of people who were white. Perhaps it's because we're from a Pacific Northwest background where a lot of Asian people reside. I would have thought there would be more Asian background web designers.
While it was interesting to see the large differences in job titles, I am more interested to know how many people strictly do coding OR designing, and how many actually do both. This interests me because I enjoy doing both in my free time (though admittedly I am very lazy when it comes to code so often times my designs just sit in the form of PSDs and never get to live their lives out on the web. I think it's time I get a slave sidekick coder...).
Speaking of titles. There were sooo many listed! When the whole survey is for web design, what becomes the difference in a "web designer" and just a "designer"?
The ages of those who were surveyed also stuck out at me. Ignoring the fact that the bar graph looks like a hand with a highly disproportionate "favorite finger", I was quite surprised at how large that middle group was. While I would expect to see more young people, seeing as the web is a fairly "new" thing when it comes to the design aspect, it just seems like there would be a bit less of a drop in numbers.
The gender thing? Actually doesn't surprise me. While yes there are more females in our senior class than males, I don't actually meet many females who are so gung-ho on web design. Not to mention it's apparently still taboo for women to be on the internet. According to everyone you meet on IRC: 'men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents'. Go play an online game. Good luck trying to convince someone you're a girl, unless they also happen to be female. This is why the gender split does not surprise me one bit.
And because I don['t want this to get too long, the last observation I would like to make is the amount of people who have been at their current job less than one year, compared to how long they've been working in the field. Apparently web designers hop around jobs quite a bit!
This survey is quite interesting. It's pretty long though, and somewhat difficult to look at on a PC. I am definitely going to have to print this out and check it out more!