Introduction to week 6 and overview:
Unfortunately in week 6 my illness got worse and I again did not attend the lesson. However, I am feeling confident as I have done a lot of work last week to make up for not being in these 2 weeks. My work is definitely developing very well which I am super happy about. This week I took the opportunity to give Kate all the designs created so she can make a decision on what she liked etc so we were able to get solid decisions on the design of the website. During the creation of our level 1 wireframe we decided we wanted to create cloud icons for our navigation bar which I was able to design on illustrator this week along with a few developments to my 'unsuccessful' logo's, making them into graphics for our social media pages and website. I also managed to find time to create our first initial logo again in a better looking way, making it into a successful website graphic which Kate was very impressed with as me and Kate really loved that design created back in week 4. During this week me and Kate also got some initial writing down on paper for our website content which Kate is now responsible of developing and bulking out. Kate was also amazing and helped me out by creating the social media pages this week as well as creating a proper level 2 wireframe (my level 2 through coding obviously doesn't count as it wasn't proper and just a play about for me to help my development). I am very happy with our progress on this project as even though me and Kate aren't seeing each other face to face, we are communicating through text, email and FaceTime. Team work is very important and we're working very well together. Kate is really good at decision making.
Offical Logo
To no surprise me and Kate both agreed that design number 1 is the best for our website as it is simple, effective, easy to remember/recognise and we both love the corded phone touch to the logo as it will also appeal to the 'Parent's/Guardian's' who will visit the website. Surprisingly she didn't actually have any development for me to do on the logo. She loved it as is (which I am over the moon at).
Development of 'unsucessful logos'
So now we have an official logo I went and developed/edited the ones which weren't so successful. I have made them into online banners for social media pages, graphics which can be used on the website, our social media pages and maybe our video (unsure on this yet but it is an idea me and Kate have as we don't want to waste developed drawings).
I haven't done too much to the 'unsuccessful' logos as we both agreed that they work well by themselves as graphics so I mainly just duplicated them into being website banner, icon or specific box sizes to help our social media pages have some content and not to waste our good graphics.
I have also remade our first 'unsuccessful' logo as me and Kate love it and both agree it would be a really successful website graphic. I have made it slightly 3D, brought back the colours scheme to only monochrome, except red as it then allows the graphic to stand out. I really love this graphic as it tells a story without any sentences, it sums up our website, what we do and in my opinion is very pleasing on the eye.
Cloud Button For Navigation Bar:
After me and Kate decided to create an initial logo back in week 4, we really loved the cloud's used in the design, we have since then decided that we want this to be our button for our website navigation bar which is so on point for our target audience as it isn't boring and we can have a lot of fun with that being one of our focuses on our website.
With Kate next to me we were able to quickly recreate the cloud/bubble design by creating lots of circles and merging them together. I am incredibly happy with this as it is a lot of fun, will stand out very well and appeals to our audience. Now that we have this design for our navigation bar we realised we would need to have a blue background to our website as if we didn't the clouds may not look like clouds or stand out. We're both happy with this decision though and this has helped us for our level 3 wireframe we're creating next week.
Creating The Banner For The Website:
After we created the graphic for the websites navigation bar, we decided to also create the official banner too as this would also be quick, easy and would get another thing ticked off our checklist. The banner only took 15 minuets from beginning to end as we knew what we wanted. The majority of our time was spent on colour and the curve of the corners on our rectangle as we were unsure on what we actually wanted. We want colour on our website due to the target audience being kids/teens. This means we want bright, bold and eye catching colouring for our banner as it displays our MOTTO/SLOGAN and it is a very important part of our website as it will be displayed on each and every page.
We have both agreed that we are in love with this banner, its colours and how it looks. The curve of the corners on the rectangle is also now something which has become part of our website's 'uniform' because it works really well having smooth corners on everything, it will make the website look less harsh and sharp, appealing to our target audience better and we both agree that it compliments our navigation bar.
Next Stage of development:
Communicating with Kate she has used the graphics and logo within our social media pages and set them up which is amazing because when it comes to creating the website, she can give me hyperlinks so we can link our website to the social media pages quickly. We have also written a couple sentences regarding what content we would like on each webpage. I am not very good with this step as I personally think I am better in the design aspect of our website so Kate is being a star and has offered to create all the content for our website. We have both decided that she will also create/develop our 'About Us' video as she interned on TOWIE (popular reality TV show) over the summer and is confident in video editing (which I am terrible at). We're planning on filming at the end of next week and I will do what Kate wants for that as I don't know what content should be in the video.