Following the redesign of this site I had a number of interesting comments on the design. Being a bit of a perfectionist at times, has meant that I’m not fully content with it all. However, instead of feigning contentment with it, I’ve put together this post to explain my current gripes and how I’m going to amend it.
White space on the homepage – I didn’t really like the homepage at first… especially when viewing it on Windows. However I’ve given it a bit more space and I’ll continue to play and invoke a little bit more emotion and dynamic information here, whilst keeping it neat and simple.
Dark black ink featured on the top right of each page) took lots of the inspiration from various comics and visits to the V&A. I really love Japanese style and so I’ve attempted to use similar simple design with really strikingly sharp edges or elegant curves.
Ideally the implementation for this would have used percentages so that as your resolution increased, you saw more of the image hidden in the distance. Similar to Vimeo.
However if you look at the vimeo site and resize the width, you’ll notice all these elements are in the background… however this wouldn’t quite work with the red borders and my black ink. So instead, I’ve compromised on this for the time being so that what you see is constant regardless of the width of your browser, but the element can sit on top of others.
Patterns on pages with posts – Currently the single pages work great. However the repetition of the speech bubbles starts to become too predictable and looses what makes it so memorable (see fig. 3). However if you see the user comments (in fig. 2), it works a little bit better but loses some of that unique personality the huge borders and sharp cut off speech bubble created.
I’m going to be looking at a few other methods to combine what makes each of these work from the above (no literally!) so that posts have a decent pattern to go by which isn’t so extremely different.
Which brings me on to a final point: theft… or innovation/inspiration. A few days after uploading the site and getting it out. One of my colleagues pointed out that it reminded him of the HSBC adverts he’d seen. My imediate reaction was one of shock. Great, first EA Sports and now a bloody bank. Whatever next?
Yet it was really useful to see their adverts going down some similar design solutions to my own and in some cases (see left: Marilyn Monroe advert ) ones that I am keen to… *ahem* learn from.
Yet, there’s still more design improvements to come than the above, yet I am pretty chuffed with the kind comments about the site given the amount of time I’ve spent on it.
The follow up to this post will cover what in simple terms went into the building this site. From concepts to UX wire-framing to the implementation. If only it was all that simple! But I’ll try make it sound it in the next post.
Still need to sort out the design for the comments!
I know it looks ugily and poorly laid out, but it’ll improve soon. Promise!
Regarding the similar designs; what happens sometimes is that people, even across the world, can happen upon the same ideas at the same time.
This is thought to be down to the same social cues or because the bigwigs in business have recognised it as an up and coming common trend or similar upbringing.
For example, two people invented the telephone at the same time; a few people worked on television at the same time but in completely different countries.
Another thought is that both people have seen the same source and then later on copied it (or its likeness) without remembering where they got the inspiration from; partly this is how memory works and the notorious and reputable ‘mental magician’ Derren Brown plays on this a lot with the power of suggestion. It’s also the principle behind advertising to affect your decisions later in the day (say in the morning you hear the ‘chicken tonight’ advert which repeats itself three times, in the evening you may find yourself buying chicken thinking it was entirely your own idea).
But in the world of the internet now, who knows? Maybe people do thieve ideas.
P.S. this text box isn’t showing half of the text I’ve entered, so I’ve had to use notepad and copy/paste.