I've wanted to make a site for a while now and knew roughly what I wanted already. An artist's site should reflect their work. Going on what others have said about my work, I suppose my site should be a little dark and bizarre.
When I was little, my parents took me to Il Florilegio di Darix Togni; an Italian traveling circus. Its best act was a leopard and an acrobat riding on a rhino. That’s how bloody awesome it was. I came very close to running away with that circus, but I was worried my parents would miss me or think I was in danger. The experience has never the less stuck with me like a parasitic twin and ever since I’ve been very fascinated by circuses. Circuses are a place of delight, yet have eerie connotations which I feel reflects my work in some ways. I often draw things because I think they’re funny, which isn’t always a good thing due to my dark sense of humor. This is why I think the circus theme is appropriate for my site.
31 August 2010
The first step in all my artistic processes is research. In retrospect, this was probably a very bad place to start. Instead, I should have started on my wireframe and html coding. I am much less experienced in programming and resulted in a bad crunch trying to finish because I spent too long on the look of my site.
Moral of the story: always start with the things you’re worst at. It’s much better for your time management.
Anyway, here are some photographic references I used in my mood board:
Looking at my mood board, desaturated reds, greens and blues with off-white and gold are colours seemed appropriate for the look of the site. Stripes, cursive fonts and decorative frills bulbs and other details are also commonly apparent in circuses. I tried to incorporate these into my final design.
After researching and building a loose idea in my head, it was time to put pen to paper. I wanted my site to have a certain hand-made look to it, since I am an artist. I have also done circus themed work in Photoshop before and felt it would have looked more authentic if it was done traditionally. Blatantly ignoring the assignment sheet’s suggestion that the style of the site doesn’t matter, I played with some ideas in my sketchbook and developed my site’s look and colour pallet further, thus wasting more of my precious time when I should have been programming. (Detecting the dry cynicism yet?)
So basically my idea was to have a white and red background with two curtains on either side of the screen. In front of these would be light bulb studded signs as links to other web pages. The text would be in white boxes in the center of the screen so it would be clearly visible.
Later that day, we had a session where we could work on programming our site. I realized in after trying for an hour to program a sidebar that my design was WAAAY to advance considering my experience in html. (0% to be exact.) It was this point that I realized I had perhaps invested too much time into my site’s look rather than just getting the bloody thing done. After the little programming I could do, it was back to the drawing board; I drew up my wireframe and began to simplify my design, as the deadline was but a few days away and I knew I could never get it done in time at this rate.
Finally, I had something much more doable, but still quite nice looking. Simple links to pages containing text with nice hand-made backgrounds and back buttons. This gave me more time to focus on just working out how to program basic html. That night I had to babysit my little sister, so couldn’t actually start programming yet. So instead, I worked on the traditionally crafted parts of the site.
Thus concludes day 1. Click here for part 2!
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