Features

I was thinking of the main features for my final project, and came across a few ideas. I am going to split the site from the homepage into sections. Find a musician, Find a band, and What’s Local? From there, you will enter the main part of the site with the main nav, sub nav and content. For the “What’s Local” part of the website, there will be news of upcoming events, bulletin boards of up and coming bands, recently updated muscians and most visited list. I was also thinking of having the “demo of the day” clip to be played . I havent decided if I want to include a forum or not. It would help the user interactivity but may add to much for this project. I may keep it in reserve if I ever want to put it in.

There will of course be a register page for both bands and musicians asking general information along with username and password . I will stress the sub nav to be easily accessible to find bands/musicians. But mostly keep it straight forward when it comes to searching.

I am open to ideas and this is just a prelimenary sketch of features for this.

Researching Ideas

www.aeropostale.com/home/index.jsp - This site was one I found not to long ago and thought that it had a very nice design that was clean yet “hip”. It also used alot of javascript . The nice clean menus and the rounded corners make for a very easy to navigate site.

www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=200/200.css - This is a web design from csszengarden.com . I have looked at these before and love how this one fools me each time. Everytime I look at this, I wonder how they did the background image that makes it look so cool. Anyway, I love how they used a simple concept up and down the page to imphasize on the theme of the website.

esfootwear.com - This I found from http://www.webstandardsawards.com/ . I looked through a few and they werent all that spectacular. But the thing I liked about this one was the flash animation at the top, but they used white boxes as elements on the page. And it goes well with everything. Even the other pages are very easy to navigate with a plain and simple css styled nav menu at the top.

www.shockmedia.com.au/ - This I also found from www.webstandardsawards.com/. This site interested me very much. I loved how they used javascript functions as nav menu descriptions. I think I will be using this in my design. The overall clean design is easy to use and easy to navigate. I also like the background gradiant image to draw your eye to the bottom of the page.

www.jamescourtney.com.au/ - This site was found from shockmedia’s portfolio. This site is visually nice to look at . The menu system is easy and not complicated. They use floated and absolute positioning which I think works when resizing the window. Overall I liked the concept design.

Intermediate Scripting Final

For my final project, I was thinking about doing a social networking of users. The site will be a networking of job postings and search related activities for musicians. This will be kind of like a myspace for musicians. For example, if I was a local band in need for a drummer, I would have the opportunity to search for surrounding musicians in need of a band. Search the drummer that interested me, and review their profile. To be interactive, I have decided to incorporate media into each profile. The account user will have the opportunity to upload their own demo track and/or movie file to show their talent as a musician.

There will also be the other side to it. Say you are a single drummer wanting to contact a band in need of a drummer. Instead of a band always searching for someone, the band can upload their information in a band profile and have a sort of “Help Wanted” section to wait in.

To go along with the whole local band theme, there will also be news, activities, bulletin boards, recently updated, most viewed guitarest, etc. I have looked at other similiar sites, and have noticed they only do a portion of what im talking about. There is no interactive portion of it at all. No media or video. I believe by doing this project, I have the potential to solve a huge interactive problem by socially networking people with media and video, while offering many other features to enjoy with the user experience.

Topics of CSS and HTML

For joining Intermediate Scripting , I would like to know a lot about CSS and XHTML. I find that this is very dominate in IMD and learning the best way to use this is very substantial in my field. Some of the things I would like to know before leaving this class is:

1. Being very familiar with Floated Layouts

2. Learning how the pros do shadows, imagery etc.

3. Designing a portfolio type website

4. Better Design Skills with CSS

5. Learning a bit more on linked style sheets.

Review of Doug Bowman’s “A Design Process Revealed”

I believe that this process that Doug Bowman shows us is very helpful and smart. Not all of us think and do the way Doug does but that doesn’t mean it is the wrong way. Doug starts off by showing the proper way of research and development before any big project. I believe that this is the right way to plan but maybe the wrong way to research. I would have looked and read the text to pinpoint any theme or style that goes along with the text.

When reading his exploration topic, I found it very fascinating of how he was doing it. After grouping all the text, he went through and put all the div names and tags he needed in the design. I found that this would be helpful in any circumstance so you dont overload your html with garbage of crazy names and tags.

He then talks about thumbnail sketching. He scribbles about 4 or 5 sketches, only taking 30 seconds a piece. I believe that this is a great way to get your ideas on paper before going to the computer. I like to visualize the imagery I am going to use first by citing the theme of the website I am designing for. Once I have that imagery , I see how that can go with the layout of my design that fits both for style and versatility. I also look at Typography. Will my header be big or small? Does the website need a big branding on each page or will the logo overpower the page? I think of all these things as i am sketching out my scribbles of text and headers. Doug then takes everything and applies the imagery throughout the design to incorporate all this findings.

I believe that this is a very great process to proceed in any web related situation. The systematic way of planning first and then designing can save a lot of hassle and anguish that are not needed at all.

Welcome!

Welcome Hi, My name is Colin Mitchell and this is my blog.