Coming Together

I'm getting really stuck into this brief, had a good day of progress today after a bit of an indulgent weekend of doing not a great deal workwise. My concept for the website revolves around the image of a stack of coloured paper (I frequently use this in my illustration work as I love the way it gives depth and texture as well as vibrant, bold colours) and I was all set to start photographing the pile of paper I had prepared when I thought that perhaps I would be emphasising it too much by depicting it in this quite literal and obvious way.

After all though I like using coloured paper, it is not the be all and end all of everything I do, just a small idiosyncratic component and through a portrayal as the central element of my site, it implies quite strongly that it is. I don't want potential clients to be put off by thinking that I'm going to put together their corporate letterhead with coloured paper, I'm more versatile and pragmatic than that and my site needs to reflect this. Also I want to avoid the whole desktop, drawing-board concept with a coffee-mug stain as It has been done a thousand times and is therefore anodyne and won't make me stand out.

However I do like my original concept with its relation to my style of work and the connotations of origins, starting points and moreover; potential. I have therefore been experimenting with different ways of executing it. I've tried to imbue a more slick, tidy feel to my identity and have created this provisional logo for my header:



On Friday we were given a tutorial session by Lee who showed us how learning HTML based web design will be irrelevant in a year. Flash catalyst is a program which is available as a free beta version and can take your .psd or .ai file and, providing you've created elements in separate layers named in a way which FC will recognise, generate the code and make your website.

He also showed as the tutorial site Lynda.com (which looks like the most extensive one I have seen), Adobe Browserlabs (a program for testing out sites across many web browsers), 960 grid system (a site with downloadable grids for web-design based on 960 pixel width which is probably very useful but I may try to create a custom window size so I haven't used it myself) and noupe.com (which has alot of web-design resources but has this article which is quite helpful.)

I've also found a few of my own web resources which have come in handy;

An article and piece of javascript to help effectively resize browser windows.

article on new websafe fonts.

Another article on websafe fonts