Rationale of Webdesign
Jianglin Gui
GRA217-2
I choose the unicef as my project because it’s the most famous and maybe the most successful NGO. However, when I look at its website, it’s not as perfect as it should be. So I decide to make some changes that I think can improve the design of unicef.com.
There were so much information on its original homepage and looks too crowded and a little annoying. Following the “less is more” principle I try to give more space and display fewer words on the page. And I put big pictures in the front of the web to attract more attention and to leave a deeper impression than the original site.
I study the website of charity:water and greenpeace a little bit and get many good ideas to do my project. I also consider the unicef website of different countries. They have the same style and theme but different ways to display information and picutres.
I use the feather effect on all the boxes I put on the web to show a more huggable and harmonious feeling to people rather than harshness.However, as the prof. suggests, I take out 90% of the feather and glory effect.
And I pay attention to the horizontal space between the boxes and paragraphs.
Almost at the last moment, in class today while I was showing my work, I got to know that I cannot use Indesign to do this project. The export progress is really painful. I export the pages from Indesign to EPS format, and then open the EPS to adjust the Artboard size which is smaller than the size of my pages. Then I save the work as Illustrator format. However, the layers totally mess up. It seems like the software automatically divides my page into several pieces but not in an organic way. And at the same time, the names of the layers change and not in an order at all. I feel so frustrated about this.
http://www.clippingimages.com/blog/brushed-metal-icon/
This is a tutorial that teach how to create an icon in Photoshop. It’s not only useful for the webdesign project if you cannot find icons with transparent background that can be insert into your project directly, but also quite important for the logo project.
The icon looks great but only takes 5 minutes or so to create in Photoshop as the tutorial indicates~
Even though this is a advertising selling indesign magazine template I guess, but from the preview of the pages, this magazine is really a good example that I can consider when I redo the magazine project, except this one doesn’t include a quote inserting in the articles.
Share~
Rationale of the Poster Redo
GRA217
Jianglin Gui
Following Prof. Harper’s suggestion, I change the Script Font, which is hard to read, to Copperplate, which belongs to the class of Sans Serif. And I changed to black to dark gray in order to emphasis the title “Butterfly Exhibits” which is black. Then I add effects to the letters so that they look rougher and more balanced in my poster together with the pixel image and title.
Another change I make is that I put all the text upward a little bit because in the original version, the button of the poster seemed crowded due to the too much words.
And I pay more attention to the details: I create more rulers this time to make sure 1> the space between “save the colors of nature” and “butterfly exhibits” and the space between “Butterfly Exhibits” and the information downside is the same 2> the height of the title and that of the sub-info. Is the same (so that the sub-info. won’t looks too heavy). 3> the blank space of the poster’s top and that of the button is the same (I ignore the first pixel of the butterfly’s antenna because the color is too light to be noticed and won’t affect the poster’s center-of-gravity position). 4> the centralized text is actually in the center position (I count the distance by creating and moving rectangles, the way that the prof. suggested in class before.)
Hope I can get an Ace~
http://www.templatelite.com/grungy-website-design-tutorials/
This website is so useful that it provides 9 different styles of website with really specific step-by-step tutorials.
I found this website posting 46 sites to get inspiration about using hand drawing style in webpage design. Quite useful~
The handwriting text elements make the website more organic and friendly just like walls of post-it-notes, passing a sense of relax and the personal. And the fuzzy lines, shapes and polaroid photos dedicating the website leave good impressions.
Magazine Rationale
GRA217-2
Jianglin Gui
To be honest, this is a rush work. I changed the theme of my project twice: from lamp design to a Singapore singer and finally to Leehom Wang. I dropped the formal ones because I tried so hard to find good pictures both eye-catching and with really good quality, but I failed. I really loved my topics so I continued searching and didn’t change the themes until the last minute.
I want to deliver the Asian culture via my magazine for people who are favor in Asian culture. I narrowed down the topic to just focus on music. That’s the general idea about my magazine.
This particular issue is introducing Chinese American singer Leehom Wang who is a shining star in Asian especially music market but is rarely known in the U.S where he is from. Leehom is a perfect example to emphasis Chinese culture since it is also his vision to combine his work with Chinese culture and he has made several albums concerning Chinese traditional culture.
It’s easy to find his pictures with Chinese traditional culture elements like dragon, Peaking Opera and the Chinese traditional wooden chair that I choose to use to keep a consistence of the theme. But the pictures I choose actually don’t provide perfect pictures for immediate use. All of them have website logos or watermark and are a little smaller to put in the right positions. I had to open every file in Photoshop and use tools like clone stamp and color sampler. The work really took time but the result was quite pleasant since the changes I made fit well into the original.
The article I chose is a CNN interview with Leehom Wang. I originally planned to put Leehom’s profile into the side bar but I found out that it is quite difficult to arrange the context in that side bar, so I put the faces of some his albums instead, adding more balance. All the colors of the text or the background were chosen within color sampler tool so the group of colors together doesn’t look interrupting.
As the magazine introduces itself, “A MAGAZINE is a biannual publication, exploring the creative sphere of a selected designer in each issue. We invite a guest curator – an international fashion designer, group or house – to develop innovative, personalised content that expresses their aesthetic and cultural values.”
The signature as well as the marks makes the cover look organic. I don’t quite understand how the film relates to fashion, the magazine’s theme, but I like the idea about piecing the films together to be the “A.” And the colors of the film are soft, and hug-able.
Its website provide online magazine version, quite helpful for the magazine project.
This is so cool~
FUTU is a polish magazine about design and fashion. The graphic design and typography the magazine uses are creative. By Checking out more on their website: futumag.com, I can read the content of their previous issues. The layout and the package design are delicate.
“Discover a whole new world at your fingertips.”
A pair of hands opening a magazine which consists of two schools of fish. The world of ocean is always considered as mystery. The color of the water makes readers feel calm down and relaxed. That’s the best feeling readers want to get when reading a magazine. And this poster just show such a feeling. Good advertising.
