LUCAS VOTIPKA DESIGNER BRIEF GRPH 324
BRIEF
Design UNL is a website created by graphic designers for graphic designers at the University of Nebrask Lincoln. It is my goal to create a website that students, teachers, and alumni can come together to share work, ideas, tips, and resources to strengthen knowledge and the UNL designer community.
CONTENTS 1- 2 |
Ideation & Inspiration
3- 4 |
Wireframes
5- 6 |
First Draft
7- 8 |
Usability and Data
9-10 |
Final Draft
1
IDEATION & INSPIRATION I wanted to create a site that uses
a three column design that enables it to be easily responsive for multiple devices such as tablets and mobile devices. I also chose to have a simplified layout giving only necessary information so the site does not overload the visitor. I chose a less artistic site design as I feel the main focus of this site is informative but it also focuses on displaying student’s work. I looked to websites that main focus is displaying information such as articles, job listings, and resources. Some sites I looked at such as the Huffington Post and Leids Film Festival. They both show great understanding of column layout and display info along with images in a balanced and clean manner.
2 I looked at many portfolio websites as well to get some ideas on displaying student work. The sites also displayed info and images in the simple and clean manner I was looking for. “Some times the cleanest design is the best design”
Both Jason Santa Maria and Adham Dannaway’s websites have just these characteristics as well as a simple and easy to use navigation bars and footer.
3
WIREFRAMES
4
5
FIRST DRAFT I made drastic changes from the beginning wireframes and implemented ideas I recieved from testing the user interaction with the site
6 The biggest element of my site is the featured articles, events, jobs, and student portfolios. This allows me to keep my website clean and easy to read.
7
USABILITY & TESTING DATA POOL
45%
55%
53.4% Seniors 27.2% Juniors 13.6% Sophmores
BA
BFA
5.6% Freshmen
80% thought the idea of the site was good + Most important feature - Internship and job listings - Least important feature - News and Events
82% think all art students should have a portfolio on the site
8
FEEDBACK I got feedback on a few things specific to my site design from the people I surveyed. The first and most apparent response I got from people was the lack of identity or branding on the website, specifically the unl ‘N’. They said “it is a UNL website it needs to be branded as such.” While I do not 100% agree with this I believe in this case they may be right. When I showed them I already included the ‘N’ in my design they were surprised and said they did not even see it. So I asked if they felt a separate logo was needed, something unique to DESIGN UNL. The response was almost a unanimous “yes.” So that will have to be addressed. The second thing I asked was “is there anything on the website that seems bland or needs more thought?” The response, after our class critique, was not surprising. They said I needed to put more design into the event list. The common thoughts on it was that it needed to be either expanded or simplified and cleaned up. I believe with their response as well as Colleen’s I will do the latter. When I asked them if they thought the website was bland or boring for a designer website they responded and said they would rather have it clean and simple like mine than over designed and jumbled.
9
FINAL DRAFT The Main concern with the site was the image at the header of the page. The original image was too saturated and boring. It was also gratuitous as it did not link to anything. So that was the furst toi be changed
Secondly some of the type needed to be reduced from all caps as it was distracting and made it hard to read what was really important. Doing so gave me a much cleaner and easier site to deal with.
10 The events page also had multiple changes. The event list was hard to read originally. The dates before the titles made it hard to read and get info from the list so I removed the dates. I also expanded the calander to corousel to different months and I corrected some of the type as I did on the home page adding to the overall readability of the page and creating a much better heirarchy of typography.