Studio Brief 3 - Website ideas & Crit

In the previous crit where we discussed about the content we gathered from out summer briefs I mentioned that I was thinking of creating a simple blogging based platform for photography. Everyone liked the idea and thought that it fitted well with the content I obtained over the summer.
In todays crit I mentioned how I wanted the site to function with some of the elements that are used in cameras and photography. They liked the idea and agreed that it was relevant for what I was doing.


An element from cameras I want to tie into my website is the viewfinder. Viewfinders vary from analog and digital cameras. I want to use a viewfinder for the website grid. Here are grids used in the view finder for medium format cameras. Some of these layouts are quite interesting although they are in a square format, I could adapt them and make them fit the dimensions for web.

I made a rough scamp with the rule of thirds and It turned out to be really limiting and boring. Only having a 3 x 3 grid is hard. I'm going to need more freedom and a bigger range of grid work to fit my content into. 

For my initial scamps I took the grid from the view finder above and placed it into some layouts. I found this type of grid easier than the rule of thirds. This gave me more options to play around with. Often viewfinders are made up of squares, so perhaps for the grid I end up using for my designs could be entirely squares. 

Currently I have decided to have 5 other pages for the website. 

Parrallax Focusing

For the homepage I'm currently thinking that my logo could be split and once it is hovered over with the cursor it would come into focus. This is because some analog cameras use this within lenses to capture images in focus. To tell that the shot is in focus, the lines in the centre of the viewfinder should be matched up. Below are some examples of parrallax focusing.
Another idea I had was that the content on website could also come into focus when mouse is hovered on top of it, leaving everything else slightly blurred out.

Feedback

Someone told me that I could use the element of the camera viewfinder and use within the website by placing it on a page and make it so the user has to scroll through it to see the images. Also for the websites grid someone mentioned that I could add up and combine different photographic grids, allowing me to have a custom made grid, which could make for an interesting layout. I was told that I should use skeuomorphism to make it look as if your looking at the site through a viewfinder by re-creating a glass bevel effect.

Everyone seemed to agree on my idea of incorporating photographic elements into my design and thought that the viewfinder grid system was interesting. I need to decide on the viewfinder grid I'm going to use so I can start developing my designs for the pages. My website also needs a name and a logo, so there are other things I also need to consider. I don't want to spend too long on making a logo, I only need something clear and simple as I'm only making a Photography blog not a big brand.