OUGD 504 - Design for web - Final outcome

Design for web although interesting I found it very frustrating, to the point where I didn't want to do any more to it because everything I did seemed to change something else. I wasn't particularly happy with the final outcome, I kind of liked how it looked but I didn't work very well as a website. I felt the sessions from Simon were useful but they weren't enough I though for me to competently build a website so I had to get some help else where.

My website basically stemmed from a series of crits where originally I didn't have much of an idea what the purpose of my site would be, I was just going off the back of my summer project research which was about the paper artist Li Hongbo. After talking to various people and getting different opinions I came up with an idea for a site which would display various different paper artists in an interactive and engaging way, it would be where people could go to get info on these sorts of things because I found there wasn't really one single site dedicated to categorising this sort of thing.

After a bit of research I started to plan out my site in wireframes in a very rough sense because of the way I was doing it seeing it on screen might change how I view it as the site was in a structured grid layout in that sort of sense.

The creased paper image was something I got off the internet and altered the colour of itto add a background to my site just to give it some more depth.

For my site I need to take about 40 pictures of scrunched up paper balls that were to represent planets, I did this same process of cutting them out then slicing them and getting them ready for a internet page by changing the format and size.
Each image was a slightly different size so when viewed as a collection they would look a bit more dynamic and planet like.

I had to get some help arranging the planets in a way that when I added more they would just move about the place, this was where I was told how to use a z-index, this was a really useful feature that we weren't taught in the sessions that effectively created an image/link on a separate layer much like illustrator or photoshop. By doing this it just means that the last image wont be effected by adding other ones so you can create a more unstructured page without having to use a grid to lay it all out.

My homepage looked something along the lines of this, the spacing between the planets kept on changing as I couldn't get it to stay a constant for some reason. One thing I do regret not adding was a rollover text or even just a static text so the planets could be identifiable without clicking on them.

The navigation bar at the top of the page was intended to have a drop down menu for easy navigation throughout the whole site but I couldn't find any that worked with it, its a piece of advanced coding that i wasn't at all familiar with.

This was the page that if you clicked on one of the artists planets would bring you to, the main problem I had with this page was that I couldn't format all the pictures to the same size without squashing some of them, this was because they are all from the internet the didn't have any consistency through them. If I were able to take pictures of the art myself I think it would have been much easier.

I think overall in  this project I may have bitten off more than I can chew, i'm relatively pleased with the actual look of the planet layout it was pretty close to how I intended it to look like.  I feel with more time and more support on this project then I could have come up with a genuinely good and working website.