Rapid Design Development

     So after being away from the project for a week, I was ready to jump right back in and help move things along further. While everyone else on the team managed to pump out their own original theme, I-- having missed a week-- unfortunately did not. But at this point, since my peers have made substantial progress, rather than continuing from my current standpoint, I decided to try my hand at jumping on someone else's idea and further enhance it. Taking this approach of depth over breadth turned out to be quite a good idea, as I was able to make just a few small changes and take it further to see what a closer-to-finished product would look like, for additional temperature checks. The result was positive, and this route definitely could be pursued further. Of course, other members of the team can take it from where I left off and enhance that even further, and this process can be repeated forever until a point of satisfaction is reached.

     If we ever get to a point where we can toss this theme file around and have all the team members add in their two cents very rapidly, I think that we'll have a pretty solid system of development here. It's quite exciting to be able to look at someone else's code-- which is a mildly modified version of familiar code--, make a few small changes, send it back, have others change it, and see the results stack onto each other. At this point, it's also easy enough to make rather large changes because of the structure and our familiarity with the structure. We know what to change and how to change them so that we don't spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to do something. For example, I took a preexisting CSS theme file for our site and changed the background picture and the color scheme, so that we have a substantially different theme while keeping the rest of the features such as resizing of the background, the opacity, shadows, and bevels of other components, and many other features that had to be altered. Now it's only the custom, specific changes that need to be made to fit the theme itself. When someone makes a global change, we can share those changes and not waste time individually making those alterations, which I find very, very nice.

     But, what this means now is that I need to take this site to the next level-- in fact, to the next several levels. Because we can work fairly rapidly, that means that we aren't stuck on the same one or two issues for a week any more. So if I don't make major leaps in development and quickly, then I'll be left behind with nothing to do. I guess this weekend will be a good time to get inspired by stunning designs so that I can contribute some major implementations or perhaps start working on the responsive layout, because it seems like we are close to being able to work on the layout portion of this project!

Theme-ify-ing

After last week's design bust, our team decided to go with the idea of creating and applying custom themes that would run across all pages in the site, rather than customizing each page individually. One member in our group already had this sort of thing going on, and it was working rather nicely, but the only problem for me was that the color scheme wasn't quite to my taste. Perhaps I just have a strange taste in design (which I probably do), but I would still like to go with an extremely simple, lightly-colored theme for the site.

Once I got my files set up correctly with all the HTML files pointing to a common theme.css file, I was ready to get down to business and find a color scheme that I really liked. At first, it seemed pretty simple, just picking colors that looked nice to me and applying them to the page. But of course, as I should have known, it's never that easy. What looks nice as a color doesn't necessarily look nice on a page, and once you get to the point of combining colors, things get quite disastrous and you enter this infinite loop of:
                       while (ugly) {
                         pick (color)
                       }
for what seems like forever. Even when using a color scheme generator, it was difficult to get it just right for our site. A little color goes a long way, and even the least-saturated colors seem to be too much.

Although I'm not very satisfied with it, the current theme that I have is what I would call a "tree" theme. As I was playing with greens and browns for that au naturel look, a branch struck me in the face and made me realize, "I should make this page emulate the look of a tree!" We had to get rid of the foliage-rich backgrounds, but who said we couldn't integrate them into the pages' components themselves? Starting from the bottom, the widgets are the brown "tree trunks", and as you work your way to the top, you transition into the green leaves that lighten up as you get towards the "canopy". Some of the widgets are quite tall, so even more so I thought it was appropriate to apply this sort of color scheme. While it doesn't exactly look appealing, the idea is pretty neat (in my opinion), and I would very much like to keep working at this for a little while longer to see if I can get a really clean and nice looking theme. Part of the issues I had were due to structural limitations with the page, so if I want it to look really nice, then I might have to do some major reconstruction across all the pages.

Surely enough, progress is indeed being made, but hopefully this portion will round off soon so that we can get back to the fun stuff: the responsive layout of the pages!

Challenging Design Challenges

     So the results of submitting my design mockups are in!-- and it looks like a bust.. well, not really a bust, but I'm sure it would not have been very successful. And I say "would not have been" because we didn't even get to take a look at my design. As a group, our entire team presented our ideas to our supervisor, as he gave immediate feedback on our choices. One of the first stipulations was, "no dark backgrounds!"-- oh jeez, that's great, my whole theme is based on a dark background! I guess it's time to scratch that idea and go back to square one, or rather, square zero. What seems to be the common issue in all of our implementations is that we don't exactly understand the functionality of the website. Many of us omitted important components that we did not know were necessary, and as a result, no matter how nice we could get the color scheme and layout done, we'd still have to redesign it in the end. And that's one particularly challenging part about web design-- you can't just be a designer. You have to know the ins and outs of each web page and the site as a whole. But, that's also where this rapid feedback system comes in handy. I've seen far too many times where an idea or design gets criticized and ultimately shut down by a supervisor, and I always feel bad when I see the designer-- who put so much effort into it-- get told that it wasn't good enough. Well, now it's my turn to be in those shoes, but the fact that I've only worked on it for several days and not several weeks or even months makes me alright with it, because it prevents me from putting in any extra, unnecessary work into it.

     So what I have done this week was go back to the basics and work carefully: strip out all the styles from the HTML and place them into a separate CSS file, then slowly start customizing it to make it look beautiful, yet still completely functional with all its intended purposes. I've also been thinking a lot about design choices in general, and have been looking for nice examples of color schemes. In fact, one site that I particularly like is actually Google. Looking at GMail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, they all use a very clean palette-- whites and grays for most of the components, with vibrant but soft colors for buttons. Even Blogger, the site that I'm using and looking at right now has a very simple yet appealing taste to it. The buttons are geometrically nice and the layout is very simple, which makes for a very modern, simple look.

     With all the talk and thinking about design and color choices, I find myself constantly looking at things and analyzing their design choices. Just the other day, I was walking by some modern-looking fashion stores, and found myself staring at it for a long time, not to admire what was inside, but rather its color scheme, use of space, and layout. I suppose it's a good thing to be paying attention to such detail, but at the same time, I feel like I've become some sort of design-analyzing robot! All in all, however, it is really interesting to notice these qualities that most people walk by without even noticing them.