Thursday, 8 January 2015

OUGD504: SB3- Evaluation

Studio brief 3 was something I hadn’t been overly looking forwards to, I felt out of my depth when it came to designing a website and completely drowning in the Atlantic when it came to coding. That being said I was certainly pleased with the subject I’d be doing for it- bee conservation; this meant I already had a rough knowledge of how these websites worked as I had been on and off them all summer.

From my research I knew I wanted a flat design style website, cut the overly detailed graphics, keep it simple and about the information first and foremost. Unfortunately though my first attempts at digitally producing my designs didn’t go according to plan. In scamp form my initial ideas looked beautiful but making those scamps a reality was just awful. I always tend to make horrendous mistakes on my first attempts at anything, it’s always a little down heartening and no matter how many times it happens I find it difficult to recover from. ‘Oh I’m an awful designer, look at what everyone else is producing! Why am I so terrible, I’ve learnt nothing!’: but this is just an annoyingly essential phase in my process and once I had some more feedback I was able to go back and reproduce new scamps and new designs that looked a lot better.

I didn’t enjoy coding, I barely understood coding. It was a genuine relief once we were informed it wasn’t an essential part of the submission because I think that would’ve stressed me out far too much.

So as far as the website goes being commercially viable I think I did ok. The designs I ended up with were flexible for different devices and worked on large screens and small, the text I chose was a web safe font, the design wasn’t overly complicated and the images weren’t particularly large so loading time would be quick and despite all these practical characteristics I don’t think it looks boring. It may not be the most interesting site to interact with but it’s there to provide information, not entertain and it suits that purpose well.

Where target audiences are concerned on reflection I don’t think it’s really as attractive to children as I hoped it would be, it is a little plain and dull, but perhaps it would be something that could interest older children and teenagers or even parents as opposed to younger kids. This is a shame because I’ve sort of missed my target audience with the look, the information is in small enough doses to be easily absorbed by kids but the style wouldn’t interest them. Perhaps if I had added a cute little bee character or some interesting animations or even a game it may have better suited them, but live and learn. I think my key problem is I tried to reach too wide of an audience and ended up accommodating some but not all. If I were to do this again I would rethink who my exact audience is.

As a whole I’m happy, could be happier but that’s always going to be the case.



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