interface design

This web page is designed to attract both children and parents who might be interested in registering for the CNY Korean School. Therefore, my design strategy here was to put bright colors and cute icons to draw their attention. Bright colors such as red, purple, and yellow were chosen for the icons, and I purposely chose light shade of orange as sort of the main color for this webpage because it immediately caught my eyes and it seemed like an appropriate color for the concept. Each page has an icon that sums up what the page is basically; for example, in the “where we are” section, I drew a “car” to indicate what this page was going to be about. These icons are placed next to its headings to also indicate what the heading mean.

The links are in the shape of grass because when we think about things that children like to do, we make a link with outdoor activities. When the link is clicked, the entire link is highlighted in white which I think is pretty cool and unique.

I left the text box in white to show contrast with the colors around it. By doing this, I felt that it was much easier for readers to read the body text.

The lists on the page are placed in order so that it goes from most important ones to the least important ones.

Interface design

For this project I choose to pick an event connected to my poster design. This event is a coat drive put on by an organization called New York Cares in December. For my poster project I did another event from this organization. The homepage is the last image and I used a picture with children in coats because children usually evoke positive emotions from people. The other pages support the homepage and give more information about the organization. I also created a donation page that is not pictured here and a receipt for people to claim their donations on their taxes.

web design

Design Strategy
I decided to do the top of the web page in the curvy shape because I wanted it to resemble a wave since the event involves running into water. I added the curves to give the illusion of waves and to add dimension to the design.
I put the navigation bar on the left because it’s easy to find things there. I decided to change the color of the link the person was on so that they would know which page they were on. I kept all of the paragraphs short because it would be easier to read that way. I also presented some information in list form so that it would cause diversity to the webpage and thus make it more pleasing.
I feel that the links I chose answered the questions that would generally arise. The who, what and why are addressed on the home page. The where and when are discussed in the event page. I added a donations link because that is the main function of the event. The other links, photos and press, were added for fun things for people to look at. The links are arranged in that order based on their importance to the event and reader.

Choice of Typefaces:
I chose Verdana because I wanted a font that would be used on all types of computers. I was able to create diversity of the font by using it as italic and regular and in different sizes.

Choice of color
I decided to use greens and blues and whites in the design because of the pictures I found. I based the color scheme off the water in the pictures. I also used these colors because the plunge is very early in the new year so the water will be very cold so I wanted cool colors.

Choice of Pictures
All of the pictures I used were from google images except for one. The one of the girls dressed up like superheroes is from Facebook. I chose these pictures because I wanted penguins since the event is called the Penguin Plunge. I chose the superhero picture because it’s one my friends took from when they participated

Hey look, visual hierarchy!

I love this layout because it is painfully simple, as it should be- it is webassign after all. Online homework should be straightforward. The red leads our eyes around the page, there are two navigation bars- top and left side. They are very simple and easy to understand. There is a nice red border outlining the sign-in page, and there is a nice red button, which your eye hits and then you realize "oh, this is where I sign in". That screams great visual hierarchy (score! easy navigation).

Visual Hierarchy

Barack Obama's website is genius, and is the most copied website right now.  The blue catches my eye and brings me in. You can see the visual hierarchy immediately. The white navigation bar stands out brightly against the very American blue, and the pres and vice pres elect "oversee" the website with strength. There is no doubt who this website is for.  My eyes skips from red button to red button, encouraging me to click.  Well organized, informative, and modern. My favorite!

Clint Clemens - a bit late

I attended the Clint Clemens lecture on November 6th (and am just now getting around to writing about it). I'm definitely not a photographer, but I certainly appreciate good photography and it was a treat to hear Clint explain how a lot of his photos came to be. I was impressed with his tendency to get in on the action wherever he can find it, and it made me appreciate the art a little more just hearing everything that goes into one of his photographs. Clint is definitely very scientifically-minded (as was evidenced by the second half of his lecture/presentation), and I was very surprised at how technical some of the processes he used were. I would never think to attach a paraplegic's sidecar to a motorcycle to get action photos, and the device he conjured up for some of his boating clients was ingenious. Being very naive to the whole photographic process, I had no idea that it would require an elaborate rig like that to get a blurry background and focused subject, so this presentation gave me a newfound appreciation for the art and science of photography.

visual hierarchy

the visual hierarchy here in Youtube site is very strong. They placed the search function at the
very top and middle of the page since it is the most important one. Then as you scroll down, you'll see that they added icons in red and orange. Red and orange are said to be very strong colors; they are capable of attracting viewers' eyes. These icons are placed in boxes and each box takes you to different page. At the right corner of the top page, you will see a log in function. By separating this with the entire website, it allows members to easily find it and log in. The website overall is very organized, and even though there are alot of ads, they organized them in a way that is not distracting.

visual hierarchy

I really like CNN's website. The visual hierarchy is great on the website with the navigation bar on top and then with the breaking news right under that. Under the breaking stories are groups depending on subject which makes it easier to find what your looking for. The big picture for one of the stories attracts the reader's attention, as does the use of red. The idea to post both articles and videos is clever as well. The one thing I would change is the length of the page. It tends to be pretty long. Overall it's a very nice website.

Visual Hierarchy

I think the Vitamin Water website is a great site. I love the way it has plenty of white space and is very simple, yet fun with all of the color. I really like the setup with all of the flavors of water lined up and trailing off into the background. It creates a great element of movement and the visual hierarchy, with the product being the most prominent thing at first glance, is fantastic.

Magazine (Floating Redo)

Sorry this is late. I did my floating redo, and I couldn't figure out how to get it on here until my lab TA helped me yesterday!

Rationale

Coming from an Italian family, I have seen my share of wine magazines. I have always thought they were very stuffy; almost inapproachable. These memories inspired me to create CORKED, a wine and style magazine. The magazine is aimed at wine enthusiasts from ages 21 to 60 right up into the 70’s. It is modern and clean, yet appealing to those who enjoy moving forward with the modern times with a glass of Chardonnay in their hands.
When I found the “Unpretentious Pairings” story on LexisNexis from the October 2007 issue of Cheers, I knew it was the perfect fit. It espouses everything my magazine is about: keeping up with the trends while maintaining that classic wine relationship. It also provided several options for sidebars, so I picked it.
Upon reading it, I was inspired by all the descriptions of the foods – sour, tangy, spicy, acid, grilled, fried, buttery, etc. – and I went on a quest for pictures that tickled my taste buds like the story. The first picture I saw was a plain white dinner plate, and the headline “Well Plated” (a play on the idiom “well stated”) popped into my head. I would put the dek on the plate and have a beautiful bleeding editorial image on the right side. Clean, stark. That is the momentum and the purpose of my design.
The idea to put the dek in the shape of the wine glass came about after seeing the dek just in a square on the plate and realizing it didn’t connect to the story or to the visual. So a wine glass was born.
I purposely have a frame of white around my text. It makes it stark and really makes the red (the spot color from the wine) stand out against the page, the same way the red stands out in the picture. Everything is squared off, keeping with my modern feel for the magazine. The script keeps the old=fashioned feel. I was able to achieve this with my 5x5 grid pattern.
The picture on the second spread emphasized the variety of wines available to enthusiasts and I purposely lined up the levels of wine to the text to carry the eye over. The pictures on the third spread are bright and incorporate the colors in them.
The sidebar fits in perfectly with my 5x5 grid. I rarely see a sidebar at the top, so I used my imagination and added that innovative aspect to my design, while sticking to clean basics for the majority of it. I want it to be modern and readable, and I hope I have achieved this.

Type Challenge - Mary Tyler Moore

This week's type challenge is from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

What is the typeface used in the title?


First person to e-mail Professor Taylor with the correct answer wins a Starbucks card.

PR student's survey

Professor Taylor passes along this survey from a PR student. Here's the message:

We appreciate you taking the time to complete our MAR 356 survey about our
Hookah Bar proposal for Marshall Street. The survey should take about
15 minutes to complete. Please be assured that the information you
provide on this survey is anonymous.

Here is the website:


http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=RzsVcHdx47zFceHTo4WASg_3d_3d



Thank you for your time,

Scott Lepkofker
Lina Lisnere
Joanna Rivera
Viviana Rodriguez

PR student

Brown Sugar :)

I chose a story that I wrote last year for my final profile in NEW 305. I liked the feeling of the story because it was about a woman changing her life into something she truly enjoyed. She realized what she didn’t like about her life, and she did something about it.

I was influenced by the tone of the piece. It is very calm but also inspirational. She found peace and happiness through the practice of yoga. I wanted her fulfillment to shine through the art space. The piece is all her character, and how she changed her career to fit that character. The colors and the images that I chose, display confidence and balance. They are yoga images, which is obviously appropriate for the story. I also included some illustrations because it shows creativity which is part of the main character’s personality.

Story choice:
I really wanted to do a bridal magazine because I thought it would be a lot of fun to put together and it was. I didn’t want to do a story about dresses because it was cliché and overdone. I also didn’t want to do a feature about a particular person or event because it would have been difficult to find pictures of that exact event or person to go with the story. By looking on LexisNexis I found an article about a new trend in wedding cakes that would be fun, fresh and easier to get pictures of. I also new I wanted a story about wedding cakes because I liked the idea of having the history of the wedding cake as my sidebar and to be able to do that I had to find a story about cake.

Art design:
I designed the cover around the picture I happened to find. I loved the bouquet in the picture because it added color to a very white picture so I decided to bring the color out by using pink and green as my text on that page. The name of my magazine came from a phrase that is often told to the bride on her wedding day. I didn’t want anything that had the word bride in it because it is overdone. I also wanted a longer title so that it spread across the top of the page. It made for a better design look. I chose gold as the color for it because gold is a classic, elegant look, which are two words that I associate with brides. Also I wanted a color that would be able to remain the same for every issue so that the collection of magazines had a similar cohesive look.
I chose an ad for the back cover because it’s logical for a magazine to have an ad there. Engagement rings were a logical choice because of the wedding affiliation. All of the bridal magazines I’ve looked at have had engagement rings on the back.
The first spread was based on a picture I found of a cupcake cake. This picture had a great shape that allowed for a perfect place for the deck head. The other pictures I found for the spread had pinks, whites and beiges so I decided to play on the pinks and write the headline in it. I chose a font that was a script because I wanted it to look like someone could have written it in icing.
The second spread was based on the color scheme that appeared from the pictures I chose. All of the pictures went well together. The sidebar also played off the colors seen throughout the article. I especially played off the picture of the rose cake by using a pink background and adding red roses. By using a pink box for the sidebar it provided separation from the rest of the spread while connecting it to the article by having it be the same color as the dropped letter.

Kelina's Magazine Project

Story choice:

From the first day the project was announced, I had a story picked out. But, when I started looking for photos, I was unable to find large enough ones to suit the topics. So I had to change stories. Election Day came around and I found myself on The Daily Orange's breaking news team. I was on the Quad for the post-election Obama celebration. I ended up writing the story that night and knew that it would be perfect for this project. At the same time as the Quad rally, there was a party on South Campus that was broken up by DPS. I fused the two stories together and laid out the design according to the "Tale of Two Parties" idea.

magazine design

Although I am not quite finished with my magazine project, here is what I have so far. The name of the magazine is Stiletto, hence the Prada Monolo Blanik ad on the back. My story is about racism on the catwalk, and I wanted to illustrate that with the barbie models on the cover and the photos throughout. I'm not quite sure what color scheme I'm going to end up using for my deckhead and quotes as of yet, but here is just an example. I need to add captions to some of the photos still and more stories to the cover. I chose to do a third spread because I loved the picture of Jourdan Dunn and Josh Beech. Jourdan is one of the main models discussed in the article and I thought the photograph illustrated the racism in the industry very well. I also loved of the picture looked bleeding across the margin.

TRASH magazine....

MAGAZINE!
Choice of Story:
The story I chose was about consumption and being eco-friendly. As Americans we are constantly consuming products that we don’t need and throwing away ones that are perfectly fine. I personally am not one of those people. I do most of my shopping at thrift stores as well as contribute products to thrift stores. At first, I wanted to do a spread on thrifting; however, there wasn’t a lot of information on it. The next best thing was an eco-friendly magazine with a feature article on thrifting. In addition, if this was a magazine, I was thinking how much shelf life would it have if it were solely on thrifting. Sooner or later the content would become repetitive. With a magazine on being eco-friendly, there’s a lot more to talk about. This magazine can be a global magazine that discusses problems in other countries besides America.
Verbal influences:
The words that influenced me were bamboo, thrift stores, landfill, and 68 pound of clothing. My first idea was to put bamboo on one sides and the price tags used in the thrift store on the other. I thought that this layout would be verbally pleasing. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the tags and had to come up with another solution. So instead, I used a picture of an inside of a thrift store. The pictures of the landfill weren’t flowing with the layout. I didn’t like it to much so I didn’t want to use it.
NOTE THE WORDS ARE HIGHLIGHTED IN ORANGE

my magazine

Show all

Why did you choose the story?

I chose the story on Japanese denim because of a personal interest and for a design strategy. I have been a denim addict ever since I purchased my first Japanese denim. I realized that jeans can do more than just looking nice; wearing that perfect jeans with the right cut can make your whole outfit ten times better. Japanese denim are famous for this reason, they make you feel like you own the jeans as if they had been customized for your body. The artisans spend endless hours studying and analyzing all body types of people and their efforts are truly reflected on the jeans they sell. Japanese denim aren’t just typical denim, they are a work of art created by denim artisans who strive to be perfect.

Another reason I chose the story is because there aren’t magazines that target denim lovers. Also I felt that putting pictures of denim on a white spread sheet would really stand bold and strong. I chose oversized photos of jeans for this purpose.

Designs:

The cover page was designed to give off a neat and organized vibe. The colors were chosen with specific purposes. For instance, for the header I used red and black which are strong colors, and the body text is in white on a black background to show a strong contrast look. The rule of the third is applied to the layout; the picture was placed on the left side of the page to make it more interesting. The man’s eyes are leveled with the header to lead the reader’s to the header. I decided to bleed the picture because I felt that positioning the picture in the middle of the magazine is mundane.

The first spread has a huge picture that bleed off the edges and to the other page. This is done to capture the reader’s attention and to keep the reader’s interested to the story. The picture is also high quality and effective, and it strongly connects to the story. The small computer icon next to the author’s name is to indicate that the story was originally written on the internet by the author. The circular icon with jeans was placed behind the text to reinforce the reader what the story is about.

The second spread was designed with a layout that effectively guides reader’s eyes to the entire page. The text starts off from the left side and down, and then to the right side of the page and down; the pictures are placed to guide the reader in this way.

The layout design includes bold lines and dotted lines that bound texts and pictures around the edges, and grids and guidelines (although not shown) that organize the text and pictures in certain ways.

Typefaces:

The typefaces in this magazine are Lucida Sans TT, Eurostile, and ITC Caslon 224 Std. Lucida Sans TT was chosen because it was a sans serif font that really distinguished itself from the body text. Lucida Sans TT is used for the header, folio, and captions. Eurostile is another sans serif that I chose for the deck. It had a lower case “e” that I could make a face out of with two dots as eyes. And because the title is “Evolution of Jeans”, making a face with the letter e would give a human attribute to jeans which I thought tied really nicely to the article. ITC Caslong 224 Std was chosen for the body text because in class, we learned that Caslon font is a good font for the reader’s eyes due to the medium sized x-height (although ITC Caslon has a bit larger x-height, it is highly readable).