Further Development, Website Gifs & Evaluation

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(Click on gifs to enlarge)

Home Page

The logo fades in from white because I wanted to emphasise on the name 'new exposure'. To make it seem that the logo had been developed as a photograph is. Once the logo is exposed you then click on it and it takes you to the blog page. 

Blog

The blog section of the website is where users can view different formats of film and different photographic brands of film used by clicking on the tags that are entered on blog posts. This allows people to see how specific types of film look. The blog page is mostly filled with user photographs as the users are allowed to have the chance of having their photographs on the site. The blog section uses an endless vertical scroll.

Photographers

Once clicking on the photographers link, it takes you to the main page where you can select different photographers to look at. The links to each of the photographers pages are shown as an image of the particular photographers work, then when hovered it shows the name. Then when the link is clicked it takes you to the photographer's page which includes a small introduction to the photographer, their links and their portfolio is shown. The image content is viewed by scroll sideways (horizontally). When scrolling through the content the information stays in the same place.  

Interviews

The Interview section of the website works exactly the same as the Photographers section, except once clicking onto a specific interview it's a vertical scroll function instead of sideways. The reason the interview is vertical is because I feel it's more natural in a sense that you start from the top and then to the bottom like most internet pages. This page is a mix of imagery from the photographer and text from the interview. 

Submit

The way the submission page works is that the user has to enter the correct details and then they have to select the upload button to find their image and then they hit submit for it to be sent to the administrators. A very simple element of the website which helps users gain exposure.

Mobile Version of Website // Responsive design.

Tap the striped icon to view the links. 

Evaluation
The website I have designed for this brief has been successful in meeting the aims I set for it. The main goal was to achieve a clean and minimal, yet attractive design to be represented on the site, which would further it's functionality too. The website has a very simple design aesthetic which makes it appealing and easy to use. The use of colours were limited to white, black and blue. Also the typefaces used are all sans serifs, because I believe they help create a clear and effective design. I also aimed to have the website relevant to photographic elements used in photography and cameras, so I incorporated a grid into my design which is used in view finders. The overall visual layout of the website doesn't take away from the content and allows the images and photographs to stand out and become the main focus. The topic of this project hasn't been altered and still links to the original content I researched in the summer.

The process I went through with this brief has been quite extensive in that I feel it has covered the right areas of exploration and development. It has definitely been a beneficial process. Creating and designing scamps/wireframes first by hand which then lead to working on to the digitals mockups was a good routine to apply to the project. The methods of designing for web were absorbed in the way I worked. There were a lot of new areas to consider when designing such as; font families, web safe colour, screen dimensions and different button styles. As web design is a topic I wasn't too familiar with beforehand, this brief has taught me a lot of new relevant information, which the study tasks helped reinforce. Learning about user experience, search engine optimisation and other digital web design trends such as; skeuomorphism, flat design and responsive design has been very interesting and beneficial. This has probably been my favourite part about this project that I have gained a lot of new knowledge on different aspects of web design of which I was not aware of previously.

I'm glad I made the effort to create high quality gifs to show how my website worked. As I didn't have the time to code my website and that my tutor was absent from college It was hard to properly represent my website and difficult to fully explain its functionality. Creating gifs was something I wanted to do to show how it functioned. I exported all the images from InDesign and added the animation and tracking in After Effects.

Coding is something that I wanted to look into more and learn more about for this project as I feel that it's a growing a lot more in graphic design. There is a lot of online work going around to do with coding and I think that it's something I will want to go into in the future. We only had one lesson on coding for this project, but I wish I took more time out to look into it as it was something I was planning on doing within this project. However coding the website is not a requirement for this brief, our job as graphic designers is to push the design and visual aspect of the websites, not to develop it and code it structurally.

On the whole this project has been valuable and I will definitely take my new knowledge gained onto new tasks ahead that involve relevant aspects. I believe my overall design has been successful and I am happy with what I have achieved.