OUGD 504 - Studio Brief 2

In today's session we were supposed to take our concepts for our websites and start thinking about visuals and they way in which our viewers could interact with the site. However, as I am still stuck in terms of ideas for my website, I used my original idea for this task in order to go through this process. Once I have got my final idea, I will then repeat this process.

The first task for this session was to think about what content our website would have and how it would be split into pages. We had to think of 5 pages that our content would be split into:

• Homepage - Showing what the website would have on it, what it's about etc.
• Partners - Showing all of the studio's partners and links
• Information - About the designers, contact information, awards they've won etc.
• Projects - Various examples of their work
• Studios - Other design studios that are worth knowing about

As a group, we then discussed what we felt were the 5 main pages of a basic website. This is what we came up with:

• Homepage - Indicative of Content, Introduction
• Contact Page - E-Mail, Social Media, Inquiry Form, Telephone Number, Address
• Information/About Page - Ethical Statement, Facts
• Gallery/Portfolio - Image (Categorised only if actually helpful for the user)
• Forums/Posts/User Posts - Very common now that the technology supports it

Overall, websites are all about the user and ensuring that they are getting what they want is essential.

We then had to draw up a quick sketch of how we think our homepage may look. This was the quick sketch that I presented:

We then got into groups in order to critique each others ideas and visuals. This is the feedback that I received:

• Very similar to original website content wise
• Clear layout with links

• I think you could experiment more with the layout style

• Effective layout
• Contact information at the bottom is well situated on the page
• Possibly try some variations in order to discover other potential layouts

• Minimal and simple keeps it clear, concise and straight to the point
• Is there not already a website with the same content?

What I have taken from this feedback is basically what I had already discovered before we did this task; this being the reason that I had previously decided that this wasn't a good idea. Due to the original website for Deutsche & Japaner being very similar to this, content wise, this website is effectively useless. Therefore, I am going to look back at my mind maps and create new ones, much like the ones that we did during the concept workshop, in order to generate a fresh, innovative and creative idea. From the critique I received I did also learn that by making my website very simple and clean, I could effectively display information that is aesthetically pleasing whilst maintaining functionality. This is something I will definitely take into consideration when designing for my final idea.