Website Project Specification

September 13, 2016September 20, 2016Leave a comment

This week in web design, we are starting to design our websites by answering questions about our overall approach as well as develop a basic layout for what we hope to achieve.

Questions

What is the purpose of the website?

I plan to use this website to mainly my portfolio work from Parsons, as well as sketches and projects I’ve work on in the past during my free time. Although we were given portfolios by the school for our work with WordPress, I don’t really like using the default themes and would like to create a portfolio that sort of flows better and is more suited for my style.

I also want to integrate this with some marketing research I have done in the past while I attended NYU.

Who is the intended audience?

Potential employers peers, and anyone who might stumble upon the website. I hope to create a fully functioning website that I might be able to transfer the coding later on onto WordPress or some sort of blogging platform.

What tone do you want for the site’s written content?

The portfolio posts might be more formal as a lot of my work does contain a lot of essays. However, I also want the tone to be more lighthearted to reflect more of my personality rather than being so informational. I really want this website to be a place where I can just show the world who I am and I can write freely the things I want with no particular focus

Design

Landing Page

I used to run a blog called monkeychic.com. I have had this blog since I was in middle school and it basically shows a progression of my interests and what I have learned throughout my life since then. I stopped seriously blogging around high school and used the blog to primarily just post marketing projects I have worked on in school or work I have completed in Parsons. However, some of the pictures and links are broken.

I really want to use this project to do a complete make over of my blog/portfolio and make the entire thing just flow together better while also just primarily focusing on my project work.

My landing page is going to be a tricky thing to design as I don’t have a whole lot of photographs of my work that I am too proud of. Some of my content sometimes is all words and no images. Some of my posts have a lot of images, but none I am too proud of. Some my posts might have a particular image I want to really showcase.

So for the landing page, I am thinking of first creating a carousel to display any posts I really want to feature.

Below I will just have previews of recent posts. My biggest concern for this is that since not every post has a photo, but some will, these previews have to look nice whether or not the post features any image. I may turn these black and white or fade them as well so that the photos don’t have to have a particular style and still work well.

Navigation

The portfolio section will have three categories; projects, parsons, and research. Projects are going to be the main portion of this category. After school is over I still plan to use my site as my main portfolio website and I want to be able to post any project whether they are simple sketches or full blown designs onto here. Parsons will focus on any work I complete during my past and remaining years at Parsons. Lastly, Research will be where I will add all my old marketing projects from courses I had taken at NYU and I will continue adding to this in the future if I continue doing some more research projects.

The portfolio categories will also have their own sub categories because for Parsons I want to be able to discuss which posts belong to which courses. For research, which posts are from when I was in NYU and which are going to be from the future. Projects might have more categories to divide which projects are digital projects, hand done, sketches, and miscellaneous (things I work on that doesn’t fit in a particular category, resources, or inspirations).

My navigation will be displayed on the header, a side bar and may be certain links on the footer.

Secondary Content

Home, About, Social Media and Contact Me (email)

Sidebar

Short About Me and Picture, Contact Email, Subscribe (Email, RSS, Bloglovin), Social media (Instagram preview), Archives (By Month), Recent Posts, Digital NYU Certificates

Inspiration

http://www.thewonderforest.com/

https://www.zoella.co.uk/

http://blog.boatpeopleboutique.com/

https://laurenconrad.com/

https://laurenconrad.com/blog/2016/03/welcome-to-the-new-laurenconrad-com/

http://thebeautydepartment.com/

http://cargocollective.com/briemery

http://www.seaofshoes.com/

http://www.wix.com/blog/2015/12/15-magnificent-websites-created-by-artists-and-illustrators/

http://rckt.co.uk/

http://www.kristyu.com/#home

Website Tree

Layouts

Landing page

Post Page

About Me

Contact Sheet

Civic Center Map – Government Buildings

October 27, 2015September 1, 2016Leave a comment

This week’s mapping assignment was to get lost somewhere in the city and map it out. I chose to go further downtown to Civic Center. This location holds buildings such as the Supreme Court building and City Hall. I wanted to map these buildings that had a particular architecture. Some government buildings like police headquarters had architecture that wasn’t as intricate, which is why I decided to not include them.

Here is the map I created with the buildings laid out on them.

This is the layout without the buildings.

Textures Visual Essay

October 13, 2015September 1, 2016Leave a comment

Food

Fabrics

The Story of the Block

October 11, 2015September 1, 2016Leave a comment

Jane Street seemed to be a very quiet block that was out of the way of the crowded noise that typically weaves throughout the streets of New York. Not much activities went one. It is very still and is one of those undiscovered gems in New York. One would not expect much to happen on these streets, which is very hard to find in such a chaotic city.

Again with this project we went through a series of iteration to reach a final two pieces. This first draft was two sequence the buildings in the order they along one side of the street. Next was a sketch of that layout. This allowed us to gain a full perspective of how the block looked like during the entire scene. In this layout the numbers correlated with the placement of each building along the block.

On another layout we played with the images on a block grid. The purpose for this was to pay attention to detail of each building as we zoomed in and out of the images. We also looked for a significance for certain placings of images. For mine I decided to reflect the piece to an audio volume control. Some buildings I would zoom more or less into each buildings on both side of the street.

The last draft for the layout was to again understand placement of buildings. We would leave empty spaces for parts of images we did not want to give any attention to and only she the necessary parts of buildings. The images were also numbered to show what part of the building photo or drawing is being put on display. We only really looked at what parts on the buildings were really important and there was a rhythm to how much of how little we showed of the building

For the final collage piece I wanted to display that more action tended to gravitate towards the end of the street. As you got to the middle the piece focused on the events of the buildings. What in the building’s architecture really stood out. As you got inside the street it didn’t really matter what actions were going on because it was the atmosphere of the block that really mattered. But before you enter or after you exit the street, that’s when the typical busy New York pace takes place once again.

This also reflected within my booklet when I want to focus on highlighting any characteristics Jane Street had to offer. The layout and storyline were told in a way to portray the sequence of events by order of how I experienced the block myself

Amanda Wu

Parsons Portfolio

Tag: layout