Week 3.1

Before I started college, I used to do minimal web design for myself and some friends - but that didn't entail designing websites from scratch so much as designing layouts for existing websites. Even so, it gave me enough experience in HTML and CSS to not be completely lost when I had to take web design as a class.

This is my first "real" website design, I guess you could say. It was made in Photoshop CS3 as a project for which I chose the Downtown Dance Studio. My concept for it was fairly simple: it was a dance studio - and one for ballet, if the provided logo was any indication - so I went for elegance. The main color for the website was taken from the logo; I didn't think that, were this for a real client, deviating too far would go over too well, and I knew I could make it work. I ran into one problem with using that color, however; it was too flat and plain to be used as a background for the text boxes and navigation bar. So I tried using a gradient overlay, and got the effect it has now, which was much more to my liking.

As for the text itself, I still wanted to keep true to the client's already existing identity. I seached through serif typefaces to find one similar to the logo's, and I actually ended up finding the same one. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used that typeface for the body text and kept it to the headers and navigation links. I might change that in the future for better readability.

I didn't have that many problems with the design. The main thing that bothered me was that there was a lot of white space between each component that made it look... oddly spaced, I guess? I'm not sure what led me to try borders, but once I did, it made it look much less like the parts of the site were floating. But there was still a bit of white space that I didn't like, so I made some decorations out of dashed lines to fill it up. That made everything look more unified, and completed the design.