Some Backlogged Work: Creative Brief, Portfolio Site

Site URL: LauraJennette.Wordpress.com

Description of Contents: Projects (photographs, posters, identities, cards, website design, motion design, apparel design), About Me, For Clients, For Fellow Artists, Inspiration, Contact, links to process blogs.

Target Audience: As this will be a portfolio blog, I want to engage both prospective employers and casual web surfers. Pretty much anyone and everyone out there.

Some Backlogged Work: [Motion] Design for the Screen

Design for the [Mobile] Screen Example

This week's Design for the Screen example comes with an additional requirement: That it be design for the screen of a mobile device.

A good design for the mobile screen should be simple, streamlined, easy to use (to the point of being painfully obvious), and load quickly. Being fitted to the screen is an absolute must, so that your text and pictures won't be cut off when they're sized to fit the screen of a mobile device, or stretched when they're fit to a full-sized computer screen.

My example for the week:

http://www.quickmobile.com/sundance/#_home

Simple, easy to use, easy to understand, engaging colors, interesting enough to catch the eye, but simple enough to load quickly.

Website Re-Design Project

Well here we are again! This time, discussing...

Websites! And - The Design of Same.

And I am really to tired right now to come up with anything useful to say. So! Here is my homework: Screenshots of the pages that I've made, critique from my peers. In. That. Order.

Here we go.

(Ohoh, and this right here is the layout that I want to apply to all of my webpages, but whenever I try to, it just shows up with a big black bar in the middle. Which is annoying.)
Comments:

-Add depth to overall site

-Include a more colage-y, artsy feel

-Alignment of pages - text, images, etc.

-Menu - explore different states (i.e., rollover, click, active), perhaps NOT type change.

Design for the Screen Example

The example I've brought this week is the website for the Blue Lotus Yoga Studio on NW st. in Raleigh. I love the color palette they've chosen, their overall aesthetic is calming and cohesive, and the site itself is easy to navigate.

http://www.bluelotusnc.com/

And that is that.

Partial Participation

WELL hello again, dear readers. Haven't seen you all around here in a while! How's life been going?

Oh, I don't really care. It's the end of fall break, I have to get back to work now, let's cut the pleasantries short here.

*Ahem*

The Design for the Screen class has been assigned the [collectively individual] task of discovering a website that we think displays either very good or very bad design.

Therefore, behold: uwall.tv. Apart from being based on a really cool concept (it's a wall! Of music! Yay!), it's also interactive, well-defined and laid-out, clear and concise, and, perhaps best of all, free.

HW: The Unknowable Interface

This week's homework assignment: sketch or take a picture of an Unworkable or Confusing Interface.

A lot of people brought in washing machines/driers (including, but not limited to, clothing and hair driers), we had one Remote Control, and one car radio.

I brought in my sketch of an Apple device.

Apple is supposed to be revered for it's design. Smart, right? Definitely streamlined. Simple to a fault. Strategically marketed. Superbly iconic. My list of adjectives beginning with the letter 'S' could go on.

So I was frankly surprised and slightly shocked when I tried to change the song on my roomie's iPod. And couldn't.

The Nefarious Instrument in question

This is her iPod Nano. It's the newest version, so it's a touchscreen. Which I don't actually find confusing in itself, except that this Nano is also about the size of a quarter, so making it touchscreen seems a little counter intuitive, to start. I am constantly worrying that I'm going to accidentally push a bunch of other icon/buttons at once, and cause the device to explode.

So last night, we were just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, listening to Sixx: AM, and she asks me to change the music (to Lonely Island, in case anyone cares about what music I listen to in my "free time", which is in itself a Complete and Total Myth, but that's another story).

So anyhoo, I'm thinking yeah, whatever, I can do this, right? It's just a song, I mean, really, how hard can that possibly be?

So I confidently walk up to the screen. And poke it.

Aaaand - No. Blank. Nothing.

A list of the music that we were currently listening to. A small dark gray bar at the top for rating songs. Nothing. Else.

It might as well have been a fortress. It might as well have been a Chinese puzzle box. It might as well have been a futuristic device dropped from a passing alien space cruiser. It was blank.

How could you do this to me, Apple?