An Artist’s Site…
Design Process
My grandpa is a fine artist. He was one of the painters for the Vietnam war. He is an incredible portrait painter as well as landscape. He is very talented. His biggest set back in his business is that he started it before computers even existed. He put me in charge to create something that draws people to his site and then keeps them there. The genre of the website is an art gallery website. I will have a gallery of his art, a portfolio, and a little highlight reel of him painting. I’m also thinking of putting up some tutorial videos as well. I would also like an about page that tells about my grandpa and all the awards he’s been given, museums he’s been featured in, and any other cool things he has been apart of.
The reason I chose this project is because my grandpa hired me a couple months ago to be his web site creator. I will be designing and building it. This assignment gave me the perfect opportunity to pull together all my ideas for this website and begin the process of creation. I will have to work to design something very simple and clean. I can not create anything that is going to distract from the art itself.
I start with some sketching. I sketch out a mess of thoughts that begin the creative process. I like to get it out all on paper and as you can see in these examples I do not worry about it being too pretty.
I then begin to make sense of this mess of thoughts. I create a cleaned up version of my sketched out concept model and annotate it. This is to organize all of the elements.
Next is the audience. This seems to be the most important step seeing as this is who we are creating the website for. It took some time to figure out the different personas but I decided on three that I believe would love to find their way to this lovely site.
Next is the site map. I have now decided on what will be included in the navigation. I tried to incorporate all of the elements that I wanted to use.
These are the wireframes. This was a good indication of how I wanted to layout the site. It ended up not being exactly what I wanted in the end but it was a good solid start.
The branding guide may be my favorite step. I love coming up with all of the elements of design. I chose the colors based on the sample from one of his paintings. I wanted the icons to match the color scheme. I figured I needed an artistic touch to everything I did on the site. However, I may have gone a little overboard.
I ended up trying to simplify things with my final surface comps. I was feeling pretty good about the design and then the desktop seemed a little too boring. I was so bothered by the plain gray background to cover so much space. So I added a little contrasting element to break up the page.
Desktop Prototype: https://invis.io/6MHL84SDR5V#/293611416_Desktop_Home
Mobile Prototype: https://invis.io/SMH67M1TW5V
CONCLUSION
I ended up being satisfied with the design however looking at it now almost a year later I like it a little less. There are too many soft edges. I feel like there needs to be some outlines. I need some more black outlines in there somewhere. There are also some more ideas I have for the layout but this is what I have for now. Updated version coming soon…
- Chloe Ferre is a student in the Web Design and Development with an emphasis on interaction and design program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the design style guide project in the DGM 2250 Principles of Design Course and is a representative of the skills learned.
