Final Zen Garden Site

Here is the final design that I came up with. I originally wanted the tree to take up most of the design and to have the main body copy next to the tree but when it came time for me to put that part of the design together the body was much longer then the tree, the whole design looked a little visually heavy and unbalanced and I know longer enjoyed the design I had started with. I then took the design I had and made it into something different. Taking most of the element I had before I just moved things around, made the tree much smaller and and made the design overall a bit more readable and effective. I like the way the final design turned out much better then the original design I had. I think that it is more appealing to the eye and explains the concept I was going for much better. Overall this project was a challenge for me to push myself a little bit more. I definitely think there are elements I could have incorporated better but I tried the best I could and I'm happy to say that I actually learned quite a bit in doing this assignment.

(I couldn't get a good screen shot of the whole thing so i took several shots and tried putting them closely together. Also, there is a bottom to the design but when I took the screen shot (being that there is only a little left) it was much bigger than the rest of my shots so I left it out.)

 Here is some of the html file.

Zen Garden Design

Here is layout sketch of what I wanted my Zen Garden site to look like. Doing this allowed me to explore what I really wanted my design to be about, what message I wanted it to bring and how all the elements I was thinking of could come together. 

This is my original Photoshop design of my Zen Garden website. I did not want the design to reflect this everyday scene of pretty birds flying around or sitting on a tree, under the nice blue sky so I played around with the idea of other shades that the sky may change through out the day and ran with the color yellow. It kind of made it a bit eerie but still playful which I thought added to concept a bit more. I did think that the design was getting a little heavy though and everything wasn't flowing properly and thus the design has changed since this original design.

 

Zen Garden Mind Map and Concept

This is my mind map for the Zen Garden project we were assigned. The point was to see what we thought of as Zen being the central word. We then needed to branch off and continue connecting words to one another. This process then allowed us to come up with a central theme that we wanted to make our project about. For me I had two ideas, this idea of Earthly Movements, birds, wind, trees, all of these elements that move or my other idea was this idea of Friends and Pictures, spending time by a fire, playing music and having conversation. I ended up following the Earthly Movements theme and branched off a few ideas there and ran with it.

These were just four small pictures of the idea I was planning on running with, a sky with clouds, a willow tree, birds and leaves.

Website Recreation

For this assignment everyone in class was given a website to redesign. I was given the Society of Design's website (http://www.societyofdesign.org/), which has changed many times since I started the redesign process. While my website was more on the simple side, I found that it was difficult to recreate something mostly because if something did not work out I was forced to find the answer because I couldn't take the design in my own hands and change things. This process pushed me to learn new things and taught me how to put together elements that before I started making this, had no idea how to put together. I did have some issues with the footer but overall I think I did a fairly good job at completing the design. It is nice to continue to learn new pieces of how to put together a site and to see the results.

Original Site

Redesigned Site

Typography & Web Design Website

This is my rendition of our one pages site project. The process of making this site started out with the sketch I shared earlier and was then taken into DreamWeaver to complete the design. I knew that in designing this I wanted to use more earthy tones with a little bit of color for a bit of a pop, nothing crazy or bright though. I think that after getting feedback from my classmates I would have liked to incorporate more brackets though out the design to allow for more recongnition to that element. It is nice that for this project I did not have many struggles. In the very beginning I could barely place a background image in properly but practicing and remembering allowed me to do this assignment much more smoothly.

Here is a shot of the header I designed in Photoshop that was then placed in my Dreamweaver file.

Here is a shot of the complete design I made and placed in Dreamweaver

Typography & Web Design Mind Map

Here is a starting sketch of my one paged type website. We needed to sketch out the size of each piece in the design so that each piece would fit together properly. As far as the design goes, my plan for this was to incorporate some movement in the design to draw the eye around the site more effectively.

MU Art & Design Website

For this project, we needed to take the MU Design website and apply different backgrounds to them. This was confusing for me at the time but I have since then understood the process of aligning things properly and getting each piece to function the way it was intended.