design process case study
Precious Eastcoast, run by Caroline and Sarah have kindly offered to allow us to use their project, a brochure site, as an example of the design process from website concept to site development and build, the following demonstrates how we usually approach a design brief.
establish a brief
MH < Hi Caroline & Sarah
Design Brief -as agreed during our initial meeting, we are going to work on a victorian style multi frame in which to present your jewellery parties information and to showcase your jewellery. As you have opted for a static site (rather than dynamic) I have exploited the opportunity to work as creatively as possible in terms of shape.
I have worked on 2 variants of a design, blocked out and more illustrated, I've presented both in a few guises, different background colours etc. All have the same basic structure and content, If you would like to see something completely different please let me know as I have enough time left for one more layout..
I have popped my thoughts down about the designs and functionality - I am aware though that what makes sense to me may be clear as mud to you so please let me know if you don't understand/need more clarification...
Structure: Currently there are 4 frames to displat thumbnails of the jewellery, on click of one of these you would be presented with a large view. You can have more than 4, but I will need to know how many you would like prior to the build and there is obviously a limitation of space within these designs. There will have to be a fixed maximum number of frames within the layout. I have included a "<< back" link on the orange backed catalogue page to show that the catalogue could be more extensive than just the 4 images shown.
Jewellery images: I have worked on the jewellery images here slightly with a white airbrush so that they blend seamlessly into the background, this only took a few moments, it might be good though to look at the kind of images that you are going to be getting from your designers and see how they would fit this space...
Please let me know your thoughts on these... :)
cheers Marianne
create intial design suggestions
revise with client input
C & S >
Thanks for sending us the designs, they look very exciting :)
Overall, we like the layout with the blacked out frame and the girl in the corner. For the navigation bit we were thinking about it being just a plain oval and unattatched to the main frame, and a bit higher up, so that it was diagonally across from the girl. Also, we thought we'd go for just a white and black page, as opposed to having the blocks of colour within the ovals, although we like the little orange "Back " in layout 2.
MH > Hi, I have worked on the layout in response to your feedback, can you let me know your thoughts on the font, I have used Xirod & Tahoma in this iteration - have a look and let me know your thoughts...
C & S >We really like layout 1 but maybe with differnet fonts, what is the next step?
MH > If you can make it out for a meeting it would be great and then we can have a chat look at fonts and take a copy of your gallery photos so that we can start preparing these for inclusion in the site and and make sure that we are all going in the same direction.
Post meeting
MH> We have popped up some font examples let us know which you like, we alson need a document from you with sets of images to go together... i.e grouped into sets of 4, and with that the image file names, the image "title" to appear in the site and any other details that need to appear i.e. designer name, materials used...
C & S > we've decided to go for the font in the first layout example, we thought it seemed to go the best with the frame etc etc. we've written our blurbs and have almost finished dividing images into folders etc and just need to write captions for the images and then we can pop it all on a cd to send out to you.
Have a look at the final website - and admire the beautiful jewellery :) www.precious-eastcoast.com
C & S > loving the website!
