Faculty section of our website

When I was looking online for internship opportunities, I came across this website that I thought was really well done. My favorite part is the staff bios. They are fun yet still professional. They add in some fun information about all of them that really gives you an idea of their personalities. I think we should do something like this in our website! I don’t know any of them, but just from their pictures and bios, I feel like I have met them all. Check out the link below.

http://www.mitreagency.com/who/shanthony_exum.htm

Planning Ideas

Typography can often be overlooked when it comes to design, especially by designers who haven’t had the proper typography education. Like the examples on ilovetypography.com, typography alone can create excellent images without overloading the website. I think that’s what we should focus on for our website design. Webdesignerwall.com made a good point about how online readers don’t read line by line, they scan for information. This is why a hierarchy is important. This is one major element we need to consider given the extensiveness of our website. We need to use this method to organize our info without creating too much type to read. 

Ryan Ganss made a great comment today about using grids. Grids make for a clean, organized website. I think we should use type as image along with grids to organize our information. That could make for a pretty nice experience.

I also love the look of curvy corners for photos. It adds a softer touch to the photos. We could use these for photo galleries, thumbnails, and even main content areas on the website.

Dynamic Media: Koi’s Presentation

This was a very thought-provoking presentation. It brought up excellent points that I really have never thought about. I think it perfectly relates to what we are doing in this class: designing interactive media. The main point, I thought was the question “How is interactive design different from print design?” Koi talked about how the main aspect of design is control. We must have control over how the piece looks, the typography, and how we want the viewer to perceive the piece. To me at least, designing for print is just for show, for the viewer to look at and analyze. Interactive designing takes so much more into consideration. Koi states that behavior is the most important aspect of interactive design. Controlling the behavior of the media is so important to both the designer and the user. Many people may know the technology well and how it works and the latest trends, etc, but they lack the design experience. That makes for half of a good user experience. As for us, we need to concentrate on the behavior of our websites and make sure they accurately cater to the targeted users. I really liked the class discussion because we came up with so many more ideas than just a few of us would come up with. I think we should do that for every step of this process so that we can all participate in every step and really get a feel for the whole process of discovering, planning, prototyping, executing, and evaluating.  

Test Post

Testing…

Test Post

Testing….