Clean and simple re-work

I found this design the hardest to get started on as the pared down simple design seemed harder to do effectively without the result looking boring and un-enticing. Because the products on the site I have re-word are all quite colourful, I felt the design needed to use a limited palette, while  at the same time still appealing to the right audience. Below is the mood board I used as my initial inspiration:

I liked the clean simple look of these and initially came up with the following design:

I felt this was a little too clinical, perhaps suitable for selling surgical instruments. For my second attempt i decided to add a bit of colour to appeal to the creative audience with the following result.

Well it was certainly more colourful, but a bit too harsh looking still. For the final design I reduced the opacity of the colours and added a layer blend so that it appeared like coloured filters.

Vector re-work

For my Vector style re-work I decided to go for a fun cartoon-like look which I thought might appeal to the audience. Below is my mood-board which triggered my design idea.

 

This was a bit of daunting prospect, as I hadn’t ever used Adobe Illustrator before our recent workshop sessions, but hey! How hard can it be? I think the development probably took me twice as long as it should have done, but I learnt a lot in the process.

Textured re-work

The first style I tackled for my rework was a textured style. I looked through a number of websites to try to draw inspiration. Below is a mood board of some of the designs which appealed to me.

Inspiration for my textured website rework

Because the audience for my chosen re-work is likely to be female, I decided to go for a lighter, but textured look, rather than an urban decay style which didn’t really fit the brief for jewellery suppliers.

Interface design review

The brief for this task was to identify a genre that we each had some knowledge of or interest in. The aim being  to find existing good and bad website examples to critique and propose new designs. I played with a few ideas, but in the end settled on a subject area that I have some experience in. I have an interest in silver smithing and jewellery making. There are a huge number of sites supplying jewellery making equipment, a lot of them very average, a few pretty good and one or two shockingly bad. This isn’t a particularly lucrative industry, but one that I am familiar with.