For the second part of the assignment I posted last week, I will take a look at some of my classmates’ work and review it.

First I would like to take a look at Emily Jackson’s design for “Black Rabbit Media”.

I got excited when I saw this because I really enjoy the aesthetic of well-used negative space. As a matter of fact, it immediately made me think of a piece by one of my favorite artists, Aubrey Beardsley:

I really enjoy Emily’s choice of colors to contrast with the black and how she integrates organic shapes into a very graphic, modern design. I absolutely love the thistle navigation and imagine it having very charming rollovers when finished. It may do better a little smaller, though, to better balance whatever content she may add and not to overpower it.

The feel of the top title is great, but I think she could take a little more time to integrate the organic branches/trees into the rest to make it look more like a horizon. It would look far more seamless and integrated – a far cry from the stark, clear boxes and forms of a government website or a bingo sheet, but purpose dictates form in web design. Something Beardsley accomplishes in his work above is he utilizes the interesting shapes and details that make up the women to bring the flat black forward and make it more intriguing; perhaps that can be done by some tweaking with the shape of the horizon and the forms of the trees? The logo in the center could also be tweaked in size to create better balance.

I also think the gradient could use some more definition, perhaps by adding some glints of stars in the indigo where it gets darker?

I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

The second person’s work I chose to review is Mike Irish’s, especially his “outside the box” idea:

He stated in his description that he plans on using Flash to warp the shapes when clicked and morph them into elements of whatever page you’re directed to. I think that sounds pretty awesome and I’d love to see it come to life. The only issue I have with it right now is that while the concept is pretty great, the example he posted makes me wonder if he plans to put more work into the concept before bringing it into Flash.

The black-to-white gradients don’t work very strongly and the “star” background reminds me so much of the Photoshop default gradient options that I feel it could use some more time for the sake of uniqueness. I would like to see how the shapes might change for each page before I comment on the arrangement of the ovals.

Another great thing about this design is the simplicity, something he also mentions in his description. I can see how using lots of colors and different shapes would be distracting from the content so this might be an ideal starting concept, but I’d really like to see this after a little more time has been taken to tweak the use of gradients and style.

For Advanced Web Architecture we have been asked to create website portfolios for ourselves. I already have one, but I don’t really like it. (I didn’t like it so much that I didn’t even finish adding content, whoops.) As you can see, the design leaves some to be desired:

And so I have been working on new redesigns to fix up for the class. I really like the aesthetic I have going with the original, so I’ve been building on it to make it more sexy.

Here’s the first version of a flexible design I was considering:

It was still way too simple, so I continued to expand upon it.

I’m pretty pleased with how it’s come along. I’ll probably continue to change it, but I think I have the general look and feel down. I decided against flexible design because of the header I wanted and how it’d be so difficult to put together correctly unless it’s fixed. Overall it’s much less image slice-dependent than my other designs, so that’s kind of nice.

Constructive criticism is greatly needed!

For Advanced Web Architecture this week we’re supposed to utilize some of the things Mr. Franklin (see last post) went over during his presentation. He used a personal server installation of Wordpress like I already have, so there’s one thing already that could count for this assignment.

We went over using different themes; I already have a large collection in my themes folder here and change mine fairly regularly. He covered widgets, which I already used to cover another assignment. The picture to the top right of my blog is an html widget for placing my own code, whether it’s an image with a link, a blurb about myself, etc. I also use widgets to display my archives, categories and links.

I am already acquainted with plugins as well. I use Akismet, a comment filtering system that collects spam in one folder and sends me emails when a real entry is made for my approval.

I’ve been playing with things like this for a long time, so not much of what he had to say about Wordpress was new to me. For this assignment, just to do something new, I played with a couple gallery plugins but didn’t really care for them. I would rather create my own gallery on a separate web page than in the blog.

I guess I’m just picky.