For my website project I chose The Jimmy Fund as my non-profit. The Jimmy Fund is a non-profit charity in coalition with the Dana Farber Cancer that raises money for the fight against cancer for children in adults. The organization is the official charity of The Boston Red Sox.
After looking at The Jimmy Fund’s official charity website I realized that it was lacking images. On each of the pages on my website, I featured a large image in order to attain the viewers attention. I constructed a home, about us, events, volunteer, beating cancer, and red sox corner page. I decided to include the Jimmy Fund logo in the header of all of the pages and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute logo on the footer of all of the pages.
I decided to use the color scheme of black, white, and red (the colors prevalent in the Red Sox’s uniforms). Back home in Massachusetts, The Jimmy Fund is heavily identified with the Red Sox so I thought it was appropriate to use their colors.
For the layout, I wanted to design something simple and easy for the viewer to read and obtain the necessary information. Through looking at the charity water website I was able to attain a better understanding of how effective spacing can impact a website. I used the 978 grid to align various text boxes as well as smaller images. Throughout the pages I also incorporated small images that relate to the specific page.
I decided to utilize two different fonts in all six of the pages: orator and trebuchet MS. I changed the leading in order for the paragraphs to be read more easily. I wanted to make sure that the viewer could read the typography accurately. For the search bar, I made the page that the viewer was on red, in order to contrast from the other pages. I hope that my new design allows the viewer to successfully and easily navigate through the website.
Some of these effects are really cool, even if you’re just fooling around in Photoshop. My favorites are the sunglasses reflection and the age progression effect. These are the types of effects that just look really cool, even if you would not usually use them in a professional project. I think it’s still worth appreciating though.
Music is a huge inspiration for me. I love listening to it, whenever I’m feeling stressed, down, up, excited, or really any feeling. It can convey so many emotions that an image just can’t. Harmonies and melodies just hit me so much harder than images, and that’s just one reason I love turning to music. If you’re a fan of indie or acoustic music, I highly recommend this youtube channel, watchlistentell. It has really great live performances, and I’ve found some amazing bands just by checking it out. It seems to be based in London, which for me is where all great music has been coming from recently. Enjoy!
I thought this poster was really cool because it combined typography with images. The writing in the poster form an image based on the color of the typography. The poster illuminates the tremendous impact that typography can have on a project.
Rational
I decided to go in a completely different direction for my poster redo. My previous poster tried to capture a child-like feeling through using bright colors as toy blocks to spell out “toy drive”. After meeting with Professor Harper during afterhours I realized that although the idea made sense, it was difficult to read due to the multitude of bright colors. I then decided that it would be best if I completely started over.
For my poster redo I decided that I could effectively convey my message in more sophisticated style. Since my poster is for a toy drive for Children’s Hospital Boston, I decided to incorporate a winter/holiday feeling. I made the background to be a deep navy blue gradient. I then used the paintbrush to integrate snow flakes on the blue background. I think the background effectively conveys a winter atmosphere!
After creating the background I then used the shape tool to create boxes/presents. I decided to make the presents appear in the traditional Christmas colors, red and green. In order to generate ideas for my new poster I researched vintage Christmas posters. I then found several old holiday posters that all had one thing in common, cursive typography. I chose to use the font, Snell Roundhand for the entire poster because I believe it brought a classic and holiday feeling to the poster
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.
As I was looking for a non-profit for my web design project, I stumbled on this website: 40+ Inspirational Non-Profit Website Designs. Perfect. This website stood out to me because it has a beautiful use of color. It’s very simple and communicates their point efficiently. It also provides the call to action in different places with several ways to get other information as well.
I just wanted to share my favorite website…not only do I love the clothes on the website, but I also love the way it is all laid out. Every couple of days or so, the website is updated and I think it is all put together very well. All of the pictures represent the clothing well and are all great pictures. Hopefully this helps for those doing a website with fashion and clothing.
Naked Communication’s website (Naked is a UK based ad agency) is a really fun example of a Flash website. I also think it shows some of the disadvantages of flash. If you click through the pages, the navigation makes sense, but you have to get through the clutter of the design to find information. However, it is interactive and keeps the viewer engaged.
I actually enjoyed working on this magazine. The reason is mainly because I have a burning passion for the band that I decided to base it off of. The band is called Mumford and Sons, and they are an awesome folk alternative band from the UK. I thought it would be a really cool idea to feature them in an article about how they’re taking over the U.S., since I just recently saw them in a sold out concert in Philly. At first, I had to decide what kind of magazine I wanted to do, and I came up with an indie music/lifestyle type of magazine. It has a very sophisticated, almost retro feel to it, and I think it works perfect with the band and their image. I named the magazine Parlotone. The word Parlotone doesn’t actually mean anything, in fact, I’m fairly certain it isn’t even a word. I know a band called The Parlotones, and the word felt like a perfect name for my magazine, considering it had the word Tone in it, and that’s a very musical word.
I decided to use my favorite image, one of them in a barbershop, as my cover image. I scaled it down and I think it looks great for the cover. I picked fonts that I thought would go really well with my sophisticated, folky magazine. They’re older fonts, and they seem very gentleman-like, which is perfect for the band and the magazine. I picked high quality images of some live playing, and added another image from the barbershop photoshoot because I thought it fit well with the article. I changed the colors into a more sepia, tan because I thought it went well with my pull out quotes and my overall magazine color. I wanted it to be very uniform and simple and I think that comes across when you look at it. I tried to use big, dominating images, and I really liked how my first spread turned out. My sidebar goes really well with the article because it shows their North American tour dates, and the article is all about how they’re taking over the U.S. The colors all match and it’s a very earthy, old style which is exactly what I thought of when I first started. I used an advertisement for scotch whiskey, because I thought it went perfectly with my magazine and its gentleman-like quality. All in all, I think I really accomplished what I set out to make my magazine to be, and that is a very folky, sophisticated and stylish music/lifestyle magazine featuring an amazing unique band.
