Harlot Redesign Project PROJECT REQUIREMENTS | DESIGN 673 | AUTUM 2010
Design Team • Molly Bryant • Allen Cochran • Gabe Tippery
Current www.HarlotOfTheArts.org pictured on the left
Site Requirements This document will outline the technical, business, and brand requirements for the redesign of www. harlotofthearts.org
Design Team
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MOLLY BRYANT
ALLEN COCHRAN
GABE TIPPERY
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Molly received her Bachelor degree in Interior Design from Bowling Green State University in 2006. She is currently practicing commercial design at a local architecture firm here in Columbus, Ohio. Molly is a first year graduate student pursuing her MFA in Design Development at The Ohio State University. Her research interests encompass how interior, graphic, and industrial design work together to create human interaction, branded environment, and experience design. Molly is a professional member of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) and currently serves as director for the Columbus city center.
Allen received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in the concentrations of Painting and Sculpture in 2006 from The University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Following his undergraduate career, Allen worked as the Gallery Coordinator of the ArtWorks Time Warner Cable Gallery for a year. In 2007, Allen was recruited to work at The University of Cincinnati Foundation as an event producer and graphic designer. He is now pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at The Ohio State University in design. Currently, Allen is taking classes and teaching courses in the Design Department. He expects to Graduate in 2012. Allen enjoys collaborating on projects, surfing the internet, watching movies, and reading in his spare time.
Gabe received his Bachelor of Science in Interior Space Design from The Ohio State University in 2009. He is now a Graduate Teaching Instructor and MFA Student in The Ohio State University Department of Design with an expected graduation in the winter of 2012. His current research interests involve Social Learning Technologies in Studio Based Education. Gabe is also a Certified Recording Engineer, avid cycling advocate, musician, a committed partner and father, and he firmly believes that a bio should always be written in third-person.
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Gabe’s online presence is evolving at gabetippery.com
For more information or to contact, check out I Look Good In Design, the research blog at allenjcochran.com.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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Project Charter Goals and strategies
Design team’s mission
The design team’s visual communication skills coupled with the understanding of information architecture will achieve the following goals for the Harlot online publication:
Team MFAwesome strives to provide high caliber design services while keeping the end user in mind. We believe the overall success of a website is measured by the ease of userinteraction. Team MFAwesome communicates openly with the client throughout the entire design process to better understand their needs. Through our design services, we will assist in the better understanding of websites, their function, and a usersinteraction with a particular site. Team MFAwesome supports new possibilities and insights that our clients, stakeholders, and constituents may bring to our design process.
• Generate more online activity and retain more users in between journal releases. • Create a stronger online presence through interactive components such as wiki and blog postings for both the public “real world” and academic audiences. • Revamp the overall look and feel of the Harlot site to read more as a digital meeting space and less as an academic journal, therefore facilitating the client’s intention to create a new form of public intellectualism through social media. These goals will be accomplished by redesigning and restructuring the current Harlot website. A final clickable prototype and plan for the future of the new website will be prepared as a final deliverable to the client.
How will creating this web site support your mission? In support of our mission, the creation of this website will act as a tactic to create communication between our client, their stakeholders, constituents, and most importantly the end user. In addition, the creation of a website will help facilitate an educational experience for our team (as young web designers) and our client (as persons interested in building their online presence).
Client’s Mission Harlot is a digital magazine and web forum dedicated to provoking playful and serious conversations about rhetoric — from reality television to public monuments, religion to pop music, and everything in between. As a netroots campaign in rhetorical literacy, Harlot promotes critical response to the endless streams of subtly persuasive communication that surround us every day. Harlot believes that rhetorical analysis and production can help us to better understand and more effectively and ethically influence our communities and world. And so Harlot offers a space for relevant, accessible criticism and collaborative meaning-making.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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Project Charter (cont’d) What are the two or three most important goals for the site?
Who is the primary audience for the web site?
• Generate more online activity and retain more users in between journal releases.
As defined by clients:
• Create a stronger online presence through interactive components such as wiki and blog postings for both the public “real world” and academic audiences. • Revamp the overall look and feel of the Harlot site to read more as a digital meeting space and less as an academic journal, therefore facilitating the client’s intention to create a new form of public intellectualism through social media.
How will you measure the success of your site?
• Hip, not necessarily young, but culturally relevant users • Not necessarily liberal • Students and real world users communicating together freely in this digital meeting space • Users who may also like slate.com, adbusters, or bitch.com In addition to the above stated goals, Team MFAwesome will provide research and insights into assisting the client in understanding and more clearly defining an initial target audience for their website.
The success of the site will be measured by the feedback received from the user-testing of the final prototype. For future measuring and evaluating, recommendations will be made to compare beginning analytics to future analytics. Analytics will be installed if no analytics are currently in place. Overall, the happiness and feedback of the client and both regular and new users will determine the new site’s success.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site? Our redesigned website will leave the user with a new found understanding of the subject matter of rhetoric. The user will be able to easily register to become a subscriber to the site where they can then participate in the communication with other users. They will be able to contribute their own information to the site and help expand the knowledge bank of rhetorical science. The user will find that Harlot is relevant, interesting, and up to date with current theories and practices in the rhetorical sciences.
What web-related strategies will you use to achieve those goals? Strategies of user-centered participatory design methods will be used to achieve the project goals. The design team will gather information from user input and user testing to validate the design. The design team will also conduct comparative studies with competitors to the Harlot journal. Current conventions of web usability provided by Yale, Neilson, Tufte, Garrett, and Krug will be applied throughout all phases of the project.
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Technical Requirements Operational Requirements
Functional Requirements
• Technical requirements must meet the open-source software development program, Open Journal Systems.
• The website must meet the backend reuirements of the Open Source Journal Project. In particular the navigation and website control sidebar must be maintained in some relative consistancy.
• Otherwise, the restrictions are that the system must remain fluid to work in multiple browsers but not on multiple platforms. • The browser used in the office is Internet Explorer 8. • Peak use will happen twice a year, once in the autumn, and once the spring, coinciding with the release of the Harlot online magazine. • The expected volume of users will spike with peak use. • Pages will be text based. There will not be significant download times.
• A search funtion must be included that indexes and searches the website. • A log in funtion must included that will lead to the back end system for reviewers, contributors and editors. Log in is not for the public to use. • Buttons for RSS feeds must be maintained for Atom, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 • Font size buttoms must be included for small, medium, and large fonts.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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Business Requirements Requirements • The website should be the main touchpoint for Harlot to the public.
• Recommendations on the use of social media will be considered so as to better market Harlot and the journal.
• The website should support the mission of Harlot to increase and advance the public knowledge of rhetoric.
• Recommendations on redefining the logo will be proposed when redesigning the site so as to make the logo more uniform and usable throughout collateral marketing materials.
• The blog currently in place will be realigned with their oranizational mission and updated to be insupport of the journal. • The wiki currently in place will be realigned with the mission and updated to reflect an enhananced collaboration space.
• Recommendations on URL changes will be proposed when redesigning the site so as to stay consistent with a mental model that people have of the website.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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Design Requirements Requirements • Based on current trends, establish a new graphic identify for the website.
Additional Considerations • Color, visual color weight, and logo recommendations follow this page.
• Give visual weight to the more important areas such as the journal and the project description and secondary emphasis to the blog and wiki. • Alter the colors to make it more inviting and contemporary rather than gothic and dark as it currently is. • Through the use of the described primary, secondary, and monotone palettes, Harlot can expand their new color palette to business materials outside of this website. • The use of red, while discouraged by Harlot, was included here only as a highlight color. It’s use should be minimal enough that it will not draw the user to recognize the traditional value system associated with Harlot.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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Design Requirements Primary Colors
Palette PRIMARY
SECONDARY
MONOTONE
Color Appearance
• Together, with black and white, the primary palette should be the main colors of the website, navigation, and overall graphic layout.
Secondary Colors • These colors should be used at highlights, to point out important text features or special items on the website. • Note that the client discouraged the use of red so we intentionally removed that from the regular primary palette.
Monotone Colors • These colors can be utillized along with either the primary or secondary; however have been included here primarily for print collateral materials and single color press printing jobs.
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
This chart represents how the primary and secondary colors should be mixed. Blue should remain the majority. Black and White should have a strong presence but remain secondary to Blue. marroon, yellow, and green should be used for spots of color or highlights.
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Logo Design Recommendations Logo
Recommendations • Forthcoming
Halort Website Redesign Project (AU 2010, Molly Bryant, Allen Cochran, Gabe Tippery)
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