So I had my presentation for web design and apart from the fact that it took about 5 of the longest minutes of my life for it too load of my pen-drive, I think that it went ok. I am pleased that mike and others liked the opening page to my website, the interesting shape which displays some images of my work, however he did say that this  could of been continued through out my website. I agree as I found that with most of the websites shown and mine, most people had square thumbnails to show their work, where as I maybe could of used some of the shapes from my index page. Also from viewing other people's pages I kinda wished I had dabbled into Lightbox as this just added a real proffessional element to any website but with the time constraint this might of ended up in me not actually having a finished website! Overall though I was quite pleased with the feedback and found the session really useful. 

So now that the presentation is looming seems about the right time to write a reflection on the web design module. Well from not having a clue and no experience of web design 6 weeks ago to where I am, I would say I am quite happy with my website. Obviously there are little things I would change about it like the layout of the tabs so that they were spaced exactly on each page but in the time space I think it would of always been quite hard to produce a perfect website. I think the overall concept of simplicity within my design works as when it came to developing it on fireworks and dreamweaver it definatly paid off. I would of liked to include more of my work into the website however as I think some of my better pieces are missing but I didnt have the majority of my work on my mac so I just had to work with what I had. I enjoyed using fireworks in this module and found that it and dreamweaver together were quite rewarding to use. The process of trying to link up your pages and get mouse over's to work seemed long and frustrating but once I had got it done the programs seemed a lot simpler and it was worth the effort to see my website running and all linked up. Overall I am quite happy with my website, however I just wish that we had had a longer time than 6 weeks to produce them as towards the end I started to get more into the project once I knew how to use the programs. I also think that the idea of using blogs has been really effective in this module as you get the chance to follow other people's work and see their influences, and if you were unsure of anything you could look at some of their ideas which would be really helpful and point you in the right direction.

This is my final page my contact page. This was a kind of spur of the moment idea that I really liked using the mouse over option to bring up my details, and using symbols to represent home address, email, and telephone number. It seemed quite a simple idea which matched the general all round feel of my website.

This is my illustration page, I have just used the simple mouse over option again and the text at the bottom of the page also changes, telling you which project you are looking at.

About me page. Basically on this page I just put a bit about what i was up to before Northumbria and a few programs that I have experience with. Also i put what my main interests were in graphics and how i prefer to work with illustration so anybody who was visiting my website would know that this is my speciality. I made a mouse over feature on this page just to make it less boring so I stuck in one of my illustrations and when you mouse over the text appears.

This is before you mouse over ^

...and after.

Index Page, when you mouse over the shape various images of past projects appear. This is just to give the user a idea of my work straight away, plus i think the shape looks interesting and makes you want to investigate more.

At the minute, my website has all been completed in Dreamweaver, linked up all the pages which turned out to be a bit easier than i thought it would be! which was a bonus. Attempted to get my website online but cant really tell if its worked because everytime I try to view it says forbidden. Going to have to try and sort this problem tomorrow hopefully.

I also managed to get the text to change when you mouse over, so it tells you the title of each piece of work, now I need to start me paragraph on thee 'about me' section, not sure how I am going to fill a web page though with it.

So anyways this is what my website is looking like at its current state. I managed to successfully get three pages of my website up and running in fireworks, working with rollovers which I was pretty chuffed about and my homepage has kept to its same but simple shape, were you mouse over and a different image appears. I am kind of putting dreamweaver off until I see Thomas tho, seems a bit difficuilt to work and I have only just got used to fireworks.

So anyways at this point its time to start sticking in images of my work, which unfortunatly means we'll soon be dealing with fireworks and dreamweaver. I haven't used these programs before so they will take a lot of getting used to but I am eager to get my website up and running so for now I am just finding images of my past work to put on.

So this week we got told to wireframe our websites, which turned out to be a lot easier than i thought it would be. Anyway when I wireframed my home page, out of luck it brought about this strange but attractive shape that I quite like. So I think i am going to stick with this shape and maybe stick in snapshots of me work, and maybe if you mouse over they will show up, or take you to a different page of my website.

Having just had our first crit with thomas about our web designs, the majority of the group thought my 2nd website design was the strongest. The brick wall design didnt fit in well with the selection and tone of typeface where as the wooden design seemed a bit plain and ordinary. The white design however worked better and was a more sharp, proffessional looking layout.

This is my third and final homepage idea. I tried to go back to the first idea of a basic, textured background with the white text. I will have the recent project images as rollovers, so if you mouse over they blow up.

This is the second design for my web design page. This is a more basic idea than the first, yet the middle images of my work is stands out quite a bit when you first visit my page and I like this idea. If I am able to, I will try to make these middles images rotate when you first visit the page. Whether my skills in fireworks and dreamweaver at this point will allow this is another matter though! 

This is my first design template for my web design homepage. I went for the brick background so that the site didnt seem to plain, and the white text stands out more. The images in the middle of the page are recent projects, and when I come to develop my website I will try to have the arrows at the sides scrolling through thumbnails of my work.

This was just a simple design we had to produce for a group book which we took to amsterdam, as a thank you to the designers which let us visit their studios. We were all given a quote and had to create a typographic solution.

These set of 3 storyboard images were for a first year illustration project called 'the search'. I tried to go back to basics with this project and think about day to day situations were we find ourselves searching for the simplest things that we may not recognise we do, like looking for car keys in the morning, or playing a game of hide and seek as a child.