RationaleThis project was a long one and to be honest not my favorite. I think looking back I enjoyed the magazine and poster the most. I was originally going to do my website on Runway Relief which is what I did my poster on however the more and more that I tried to find pictures and info for the website I failed. I then found “Project Earth Day”. Project Earth Day is an organization that allows emerging fashion designers to create clothing out of eco-friendly material and then the cause raises money for U.S. Green Building Council and other environmentally friendly companies in an effort for everyone to go green. If you look at the original website (www.projectearthday.com) it is awful and very unorganized. I kept similar color schemes but changed the layout completely.
On the first page of the website I created the “Project Earth Day” title in illustrator and converted it to outlines and then placed it in Photoshop. I like the color scheme of black, white, and green, as the black and white relates to fashion and the green incorporates “eco-friendliness”. As for the navigation bar, the green highlights what page the viewer is on. The top two bars were duplicated on every page. The bottom bar is the ‘copyright’ bar that I also duplicated on every page. Each page has dominant photos from the fashion shows and events. If the website were to be live, After each event the photos would switch. The bottom bar is the info section on each page. Each page looks very similar to each other as I wanted to keep it simple and easy to navigate. One of my biggest pet peeves is where there is too much going on. I like when everything is simple and classic.
On the second page is the About Us page. Like I said I kept the same two bars but highlighted about to let the user know which page we were on. The pictures I used on About Us Page is one of the founders and people working on the project and the second is from a runway show. I did a white text box towards the bottom because this page had the most text and I did not want it to be hard on the eyes with white on black.
The third page is the Support Us page, where I created a green donate button to be in keeping with the overall theme. Since the button is pretty big, I decided to use only one picture so that it does not take away from the overall page. Next to the button I put some text about the charity so the user knows where their donations are going before they donate.
The fourth page is the Contact page. The contact page has a “fill out form” where one who is interested can put their information and send an e-mail to projectearthday.com and ‘we’ would respond immediately. However, if the person did not want to contact us, but to learn more about the charity, then they can refer to the other websites and contact those people.
The fifth page is the events page. On the events page I posted previous posters for the events and then gave the user information about the upcoming event on earth day 2011.
Lastly is the photos page where I added photos from Runway shows to see the students work. Users can go and click on the button to look at the photo gallery. Also, I added a place where photographers can ‘apply’ to be the photographer at the next runway show.
The font I used throughout the website is Helvetica in white, green, and black. The only other font on this website is the outlines I created in Illustrator.
Enjoy!
Zineb Benchakroun
For the final project I chose to redesign the website of a non-profit called the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. The current website they have is really overwhelming. There is a lot of information everywhere and not enough pictures to show people the reality of child soldiers and what they go through. I don’t think it sets the tone for the readers to get involved and donate to the organization. My main goal is to use strong images on the their website so I can embed the feeling of shock in peoples’ minds so they can donate.
My main three colors are red, white and black.
Red for pain-white for hope and black is for death.
Navigation bar red; the title font is Insignia std in white and black. I have the search bar with the social links (facebook, twitter). My navigation text is Arial-regular- 14pt.
Home- For my home page I have an African boy with an angry face holding a gun. I used a gradient in the picture and made his face have some light for hope. Under the picture I have section on the mission statement, the contact information and about a film about child soldiers. I wanted my readers to have an over view of what this non-profit was all about. The titles Mission statement, Contact, and The silent army (film) are typed in Georgia-regualar-18 font in caps. The information underneath is in Georgia as well in 11-size font.
Child soldiers- I have a section of “facts” and “what you didn’t know..” to informs the readers about what this origination is all about. I have a picture of a boy who looks really sad with his quote saying “I have lived hell please help, please.” The second please is in red to show how much he desperately needs help.
The coalition- I have a section of members and their contact information and a section on The Global Coalition. I have a picture of a child soldier army with serious faces, and hopeless. They also look scared and in need of help.
Get involved page is all about help turning a soldoer into a child. This page talks about how to get involve and how to donate.
Publications and reports—on this page there are reports- direct quotes from child soldiers and their experience. There is also the publication about the silent army film. The picture is a screen shot from the actual film and i found the title The Silent Army on google.
I chose to create a website for the Global Hunger Project, a nonprofit organization that helps provide food to impoverished third world countries. I began my website by designing the homepage. During my search for images a photograph of two hands holding out beans instantly caught my eye. I based the color scheme for my entire website layout off of this photo. I used the eyedropper tool to match shades of maroon, brown, white, and pink from the photograph. I based my website on a dark gray background to provide a contrast in color without taking away from the content. I used web compatible fonts for the type, primarily Tahoma, Trebuchet, and Myriad Pro. I chose to create pages describing “About Us”, “Get Involved”, “Our Mission”, and “Current Projects” because I thought they were the most relevant to the organization and its publics. I tried to use photographs to convey ideas rather than text. I found color photographs to be more appealing for web use than black and white photographs. I included a “Donate” button in the header of each page so that it would be easy for users to see how they can become involved within the Global Hunger Project. I utilized the same links, header, and footer on each page to maintain easy navigation.
I am posting this website for two reasons. First of all, the Funnel Design Group does some phenomenal graphic work in a number of different fields including advertising, television, web, and even 3D animation. But what is also very interesting is the web page itself. It is a very creative and interactive website that is worth taking a look at for some inspiration.
This is the organization I chose to do my website project on. I picked this organization because I think it’s a great way to bring awareness to a cause in a creative way. The photography is really engaging and the site is easy to navigate.
This is just one of the many websites that has a terrible design. This article tells of the 30 worst looking websites you could possibly go to. They are all over the place with no dominating images and confusing colors. The worst part about them is that they really don’t use a grid system or any type of alignment at all. These sites are prime examples of what not to do, and they really show you how important alignment and grids are to websites and to your web design project.
This article shows the 16 most loved fonts to use for websites. As professor Harper said before, only a certain amount of fonts work and are recognizable for web design, so this is a good article to use to explore what fonts may work with your website. They are all relatively simple fonts but they get the point across and can really help accent your website. This seems like a great article to use to figure out what fonts will work for you.
This website won the Reader’s Choice Award for best use of images in web design. It shows that a dominant image is really the most important part of a great website. This website uses a great dominating image of a car speeding down the road to get their point across and attract readers. To view the other nominees, click here.
If you click the picture, it takes you to the “Downloads” section of the Adobe site. Since the weather doesn’t really make me want to march down to Newhouse to work on our my website project, I downloaded the free trial of Photoshop from here. Just scroll over the Photoshop logo and click “Try.” You have to sign up for an Adobe account, but it’s free and you have the program for 30 days. This is a lot more affordable than buying the programs and works better than a cracked version. And you can download more than one program if you want to redo any of our previous projects at your own leisure.
