design on a deadline
I’ve been busy tonight preparing for the Web 3.90 class on Friday morning. Half of the class will be reviewing the first round of mock ups for everyone’s portfolio site. I’m excited about this part – it’s always fun to see where the students take their wireframes and moodboards.
The second half of the class, however, is my presentation on 1 wireframe, 3 ways. Pretty self-explanatory – I will show how one wireframe can be skinned in three ways. This is easier for a blog template, in that is can be themed in a multitude of ways (as long as it makes sense with the blog’s name). I have completed one design last semester, which I think is valid to present again, but tonight I worked on another one. Needless to say I’m a bit tired, but it’s been fun just to be visually creative. I wish I had more time to tweak this one!
What I have enjoyed about this exercise is having to flex my creative muscles in a set time period, which like any muscles, get lazy if not used. I can see with my design tonight that I have fallen back on many of my design tricks to get through the exercise, and I hope that i can break out of these patterns tomorrow evening when I have to work on the third design.
Here are some of the resources I used tonight to get my materials:
Istockphoto.com – super good for inexpensive images. I particularly like the lightbox feature, it really helps in creating a scrapbook of images to use. I created a little lightbox of fabric related imagery to work with tonight. I was especially intrigued by the patterns that I saw on the site, and wanted to use some, but I must create my own, and time was of the essence this evening.
Dafont.com – excellent source for free online fonts. I really like that I can type in my sample text into the custom preview feature and see it displayed in different fonts. Very helpful and they are easily screen-grabbed for testing in my layout quickly. I used Antipasto in my layout tonight, it has simple flare that works for my style.
And of course the design! Not bad for 3 hours…
Second Design option for Lightfast Blog