Web design, and design in general, is all about visual problem solving. As a designer, you start with the message or information the client wants to communicate to their customers. This message could consist of text, images, video, audio and other mediums. The challenge is create a design for the message that will communicate it to the audience in the most effective way. Each decision you make should be centered on solving this challenge, which will differ from one project to another. A professional web designer creates websites that represent the best possible solution to the needs of the client. There are many steps, from planning through execution, along the way to arriving at this ideal design solution. This project is intended to give you insight and guide you through the process of designing a professional website that will meet the needs of both the client and the intended audience.
Before you begin experimenting with layouts and color choices, it is necessary to first address the following question. What is the message the client wants to convey? What do they want to tell their audience about their organization? What actions do they want the audience to take? There are many tools you can use in order to answer these questions. For the purposes of this project, you will be provided with the following materials upon which to base your design.
You can download a zip file containing these files for the project that you have been assigned below.
Based on the materials provided, you will develop a design for the proposed site. The design process will occur in phases that follow the lecture material of the course. The following is a general outline of these phases.
You will submit your design comp in the form of a single layered Photoshop file (.PSD format). The comp should be well organized, with logically named layers organized into folders based on the list of design elements you created. The unique areas of content for the home page and the contact page should be in separate labeled folders so that they can easily be shown or hidden to view the two separate pages. You will also submit two JPGs (one for the home page, one for the contact page) of your design, saved for the web in Photoshop at 100% quality. Any non-standard fonts used in your design should be included in a fonts folder.
You will submit a folder containing your website style guide in HTML and CSS format. There will be at least 3 files in this folder: an HTML file, a CSS file and at least one image being used to demonstrate the image/caption requirement of the style guide.
The process paper should outline the process through which you arrived at your final design. For each step of the process, you should explain what options you explored, what problems you faced and what choices you made. You should address how each choice that you made best solves the unique design problems posed by your specific project and communicates the client’s message. The paper should be a minimum of 2 pages. Your paper should cover each of the phases outlined in the Phases section of this document.
A successful project will meet the following criteria: