Monday, April 23, 2007

Pagination Domination: Reiteration

Clever title, eh? I thought so too. This is part two of Pagination Domination, a particular style of navigation that I’ve incorporated into a new website I’ve designed. The fruits of my labor will be explained and shown below.


Where did we leave off, anyway? Oh yes, we had a wireframe - a boring, bland wireframe, but a wireframe nonetheless. I don’t know about you, but I am not too fond of shades of gray. It needed to be kicked up a notch, so I headed over to ColorSchemer. After browsing for what was probably too long, I did manage to pick out a set of colors that I felt would work nicely in conjunction with the site theme. I quickly decided colors for each section of the site (i.e. the lightest color on the template for content) and a few copy-and-paste’s later my design had been brought to life.





Colors are often the central part of a design, but they are not the final part. Text and image effects are important too. Bearing this in mind, I set out to experiment with fonts and background effects. While the earlier phases had gone very smoothly, it was at this point that I started to hit the road bumps. These road bumps eventually became road blocks, as like a true nerd I was torn between two fonts for the header. While it may seem like it isn’t a big deal, you’re right. Upon that premise, I randomly picked one and continued on my way.


I felt a logo was needed to help accentuate the presence of the header. With a bit of experimentation into Photoshop I was able to come up with a rough idea for a logo – several boxes that correlated to the pagination-style navigation I had in place. After a brief conflict with colors I reverted back to ColorSchemer to settle upon another color theme for the logo.





After formatting the logo into the header, changing the text, and mixing in a gradient here and there, I was finished. Overall, the design work was very easy compared with ways I’ve done it in the past.


I will definitely be wireframing and ColorSchemer’ing in the future.