Project Report, Week 6 – Prototype

After gathering my work from last week, I needed to come up with a decent way to represent all the work I’ve done. I knew I wanted to highlight my artistic web design skills, but I also didn’t want it to be so “loud” that it detracted from my work. First, I thought I would develop a “business” style site. Unfortunately, to me, “business” style is usually quite bland. It might have a flashy logo, but it’s otherwise set in a simple layout.

Next, I thought I’d take more of a designer approach. I started with a cross-hatched background with a slight gradient. On that, I added my name with some “low” lights as well as the expanded, faded, larger name behind. The organic “pin-striping” was the last touch that added a nice flare to the title.

On my first pass at the body, I had the entire content confined in a box with a large page title at the top and the portfolio entries below. After looking at that for a bit though, I wasn’t quite pleased. I got rid of the bounding box and expanded the title. You don’t see page titles large than the site titles real often and there is probably a good reason for it. However, I made “WEB DESIGN” a little faded to cut back a little on its “grabbyness”. With these changes, the larger page title and the now-free portfolio entries really enhanced the flow of the site.

My next step is to actually turn it into an HTML/CSS website. I expect this to take a few hours and the code/CSS complexity should be minimal. I frequently struggle in getting a really slick looking design, so I like it when that’s nailed down and I can get into the code.