9.25
TEAM NAMES: Ale, Jenny, Sam
http://userfs.cec.wustl.edu/~ah3/LiberateCamille.html
I like this a lot. It's got a fresh idea, some fresh looking things,
and a clear message. I like the icons carried from page to page,
and the color discipline. The angled text provides all the energy.
Still think the front page is not scaled well w.r.t. the child pages.
And on the front page, is Camille's image supposed to float toward the
center? It seems anchored nowhere, aligned, nowhere, like Camille is
adrift. Kind of a cool idea, but I'd feel better if I knew it was
deliberate. Second page is heavier and has some margin issues here and
there. But it's quite pleasant. I like the way the nav area is carved
out of the left margin. The underlining is not my favorite but it works.
The color scheme, while pleasant, is also a bit visually confining
and imprisoning. Again, a good thing to claim was intentional.
I think the bottoms of the child pages can accomodate quite a bit more
complexity. Smaller titles on the child pages and even smaller images
would certainly work for me, especially if we decide to leave the text
margins as they are.
Do you see a white slice line above and below the left-side navigation
text?
Has a nice feel. Good work.
8
TEAM NAMES: Jason, Phillip, Brennan
http://cec.wustl.edu/~jr11/main.html
Splashy front page. I was not sure whether the bottom left image
was consistent with the two above it. I immediately hated the black
background with the magnet-applied-to-steel-filings look. I was also
disappointed to see only three sizes of letters in the multi-scaled
quotation. But you know what? Very cool, and very big punch. That
text set like that, with her half face and the vertical "torture"
text hit you in the stomach like a concrete block. That, my friends,
is good effect. I even like the treatment of the top two images -- the
crop and color -- quite a bit. Too bad about the bottom one. I see you
fixed the text padding on the vertical text. It could still use a bit more
breathing room. The bottom bar is floating -- a different background
would have helped in that respect.
I would have designed the main message to a rectangle instead of a square,
so I'd've had more room. It might have required four images on the left
instead of three, and scaled down, but it'd've been better for the
difference. As you look long at the page, it drowns in its simplicity
(not a good kind of simplicity). I would shop this successful banner
around, scaled down to 1/3 of its size, to other groups and try to
integrate it as a nice design element in a larger design.
I am going to have to look at this site on a different machine. The
links to child pages are also not working... just history.html.
Ok... looked at child pages and some quibbles with scale and use of space,
but glad they work!
9.25
TEAM NAMES: Lizzie, Phil H, Leah
http://phil.smackiethefrog.com/as2/
This splash is lovely. The arrangement of topics is delicious.
The colors and shapes are really great, and ghosty camille is, well,
haunting. I'm so miffed to find this centered on a plain white
background. The text above ambition is also frustratingly spliced away.
Wait a minute, let me get back to that plain white field behind your
lovely box. I am just sitting here fuming at it. Okay, if I go f11 and
can see the white all the way around, I think I see it. If it were scaled
down, maybe to 2/3 its size, so the white really looked like a part of
the design, would it work better? I should reiterate how awesome the
colored part of the design is.
Now, the child pages. How do you come off putting "Passion" and "Ambition"
on pages that are cool and cerebral like these? The colors are great, the
layout is clean and pretty, and I even like the very subtle box around the
nav-waltz. What a sweet little four-bullet box. Maybe like her own
sculpture, the chatterboxes, which was supposed to be small enough to hold
in your hand. But the feel of the page -- pages -- the feel of both pages
is not commensurate with the subject. Save this design for a different
subject. Technical quibble too... some text comes awfully close to Clotho.
Same problem near Sakountala. I would put even more space under the
Ayral-Clause line. Get some breathing room before your open parentheses, too.
Text on a page this nice should be yummy, too. I'm assuming the choice not
to use italics is stylistic. 'Nother techniquibble: your header images
should be gifs instead of jpgs cause I see all sorts of jpeg artifacts.
BTW, if splashy has to sit on a white field, why can't these child pages
too? I think they would look nice with the same treatment. Not just to
be parallel/consistent, but because they are a bit wide and a more narrowly
set text would have more impact.
Spelling error, "that he continued...".
9.25
TEAM NAMES: Tom, John F., Shuddie
http://cec.wustl.edu/~ttk2/Project2Final/main.html
So canonical, and so right. If this were a competition, you'd be in the
lead at this point, despite the very good risks taken by other groups
above... Only quibble is the angle of her signed name. The longer I look,
the less right it seems. This is proof that feeling the zeitgeist and
making no mistakes is 95% of good web design.
Front page javascript animation is the bomb.
BTW, check your ontology. I think you can hear a story and learn a
lesson, but you probably can't learn a story (except in the same way you
can learn a poem, i.e., learn for the purposes of recital). Having said
that, the treatment of the text on the left, is great. effing great. I
wanted a mouseover and was disappointed it wasn't a toy, but it looks good
enough to sit there and say "tough -- no animation -- just look at me the
way I am."
Second page doesn't have the right negative space to match the first page.
Maybe take the HER PASSION blue box and echo it vertically on the right
of this page. Anyway, the rhs is too empty and begs for decoration.
It implores, ha ha ha. The fade, including the image change of
position, is very nice. Text looks quite compromised. I won't take
away for imperfection, but this is bordering on gross technical flaw...
Text needs to be a gif, right? Jpg is for images. I think the location
of the text on the rhs relative to the images should not be aligned
middle. Too pianistic. What a neologism. But that's how it looks,
and at least the piano has sharps and flats -- yours don't, as
Louis-A would say.
Great colors. Third page?
Oh, on p1, some would say that HER PASSION blue should be carried all
the way to the right margin of CONTACT US, or better, shortened to
FEATURED COLLECTIONS. But it works for me as is. I really like the
tri-state area in lower left, where the blank box is, too.
Hmm... on a different laptop, the blank box on the lower left
looks like the main weakness of the page. Go figure.
8.25
TEAM NAMES: Catherine, Christina, James
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~mcc1/freecamille.html
Did you design this on a 1600x1200 screen? You've got to assume
at most 1024... I even use 800x600 sometimes. This is too big for me.
I just changed my resolution, did a screen grab, and scaled it down.
Aha. Much better. But at this resolution, we have a lot of space
on the right. I guess you designed on a big monitor in a half-screen
window!
The absolute best part of this site is the way the ovals sit on
the text in the child pages. Wow -- what a last minute idea, huh?
Maybe the talent of this team is fixing ugly ducklings and I should
hire you before I sell my messy house. I sort of wish the open
ovals could have been part of the javascript dynamics on the front page.
The background is pleasant. Give this to magnet-shaving boys
in the site above. Tones, colors, and layout, at this more pleasing
scale, are really terrific. Somebody has good sense. Implorer
does challenge the alignment of the right edge of the main nav area,
but it's ok, there are ovals to accomodate.
At the larger (correct) resolution, all of this goodness is lacking,
and cracks are apparent all over: font looks bad -- both of them,
arrangement of the images is unmotivated (cause you can't see the whole
oval), images seem to have inconsistent clarity, mouseover images are
way too high contrast and in-your-face. This is almost a lesson in
designing for robustness w.r.t. screen resolution.
I don't like nav bars that have pre-colored landing selections, but
that's my personal peeve... I kind of don't like coloring the active
selection and KEEPING the color of the current page. I feel that
both should swap colors. I thought your text was very nice but
3/4 of the time when I look at the first line indentation, it seems
way too generous. Single space after a period is a style choice, right?
Oh yeah, I think I am starting to hate the squares that pop up when
I mouse over the small images, on page 1. I'd have to see them in smaller
scale, but they just seem wrong as I hold the mouse down. I'd just
tear it all out and keep the page quieter.
8.25
TEAM NAMES: Erica, Jimi, John P.
http://cec.wustl.edu/~jpp2/camille.html
Oh look what you did! This is much better. You solved the black
background problem by going purple gradient. Two things pop out
immediately. The De-trois't logo needs more support if it's going to
sit centered. I see Camille's logo is centered, but we need an address
or something underneath. I think as it is, this DIA-logo belongs
aligned left, or even in the upper left. Second, and more importantly,
your big generous color field makes any text sitting on it stick out
like a cat in an open field. If you want to put text there, it'd better
look really good. Have a look at Phil-H and L-and-L's yummy box and
bullet treatment of their text. Just as simple, but good enough, maybe,
to sit in the purple limelight. You could also pull it farther left
to make it feel less pressure to look good, but then you might not see
it -- oh excusez-moi -- i see it positions itself there when the window
is resized. Then you need a better rule for placing it farther left --
maybe a fixed number of pixels instead of a %.
Oddly, the second page would look better if its rhs fit on a rescaled
window. I like the lhs a lot. The black button bar is nifty. Header
field is right on. Main image and text that comes with it, and rhs
pricing is out of scale, esp. when one cruises over to the Detroit page.
Yeah, the artistic direction here was too loose -- can't let one person
do each page. Gotta bring down the hammer and enforce those good
relationships between pages.
P1, I would not let the VISIT text rescale as the window scales.
Splash image idea and child page layout skeleton are good stuff here.
8.5
TEAM NAMES: Nainesh, Faith, Alex
http://cec.wustl.edu/~cs104/claudel.html
Nice. I am too tired to sing all the praises, but they are numerous.
Very very nice. I would go with less contrast on the mouseovers. Why be
so heavy handed? I'd also bring the bottom row up closer. On my laptop,
I have to scroll to see it. The design looks good scaled down another
20-30%... why not be safe and accomodate smaller screens?
Did that red logo come from Detroit? It looks way too professional.
Aha, it did... alas, but good taste anyway.
Gold Roman proclamation bars make the page, together with the close cropped
shots and vertical text. Neat!
Text on the child pages seems very unspecial. I like the layout --
again, web goodness is about not making any mistakes.
Oh I am going to have to take points off for the famousworks page.
This has nice images but poor scale and text that is not much in
harmony with other text. The way we land on the page is not
too good, and the layout is very blocky.
8.5
TEAM: Paul
URL: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~prenner/claudel/
This is really quite nice. I'm sure others won't see all the good
things immediately, but there is freshness, correctness, and
subtlety here. I'm not sure what the mouseovers are good for, but
the etch line on the images is good. Is that the Wikipedia globe?
Whatever it is, it should be on the other child page, no?
I thought the images on the examples page were too large.
The big problem of course is that this seems like it belongs in a
larger design or at least it needs a bigger title to announce where
you are. It looks a bit like a blog frame or minor press
release. Understated=good, but MisleadinglySmallScale=notsogood.
I do however feel a bit in touch with cc's later small scale work with
your small scale here.
I like the open-right C-shaped frame. I like the font, esp. the
justification.
(BTW, what kinds of javascript do you have that is causing an
error? there doesn't seem to be much, but something is wrong...)
I do see how you relate to your inspiration sites (thank you, and btw,
other people, this is a required element for all work in this class!).
But in comparison, you do look unprofessional.
Remove the black banner from the DIA site and see what it looks like.
That's sort of how yours looks.
9.25
TEAM NAMES: Sara
http://cec.wustl.edu/~sam3/final.html
AND WE HAVE A WINNER! Fabulous splash page with interesting
geometry, a fantastic main image, and excellent text. Wonderful
way of naming subpages, too. I have a problem with the
broken black line idea, but it looks great on the child pages.
You might tone it down somehow on the front page and let it emerge
as a surprise on the children (ha -- as in, you enter the site and
you come to see the break or the difference between the two).
I think your inspiration line should be centered on the left
block, not the main flow. I think the Click above for Galleries
text is an unnecessary extra font. I think the Support DIA/Get Involved
font is very wrong. Too heavy. You go too far to the right edge, too.
But I love the little camille mugshot in the left and the links.
Is your black horizontal supposed to be thinner than the black
vertical? It's not clear to me that this is better than the
expected equivalence.
Child page text is too wide.
8.75
TEAM: Kai and Pushpa
URL: http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~cs160/Kai%20and%20Pushpa%20CS104/claudel.html
This gets better every time I see it. I'm glad you stuck with it
and got it to this point. I still have an issue with the vertical text --
shouldn't it be smaller? But the overall impression is terrific.
Hey, I almost gave up on the inspiration page because it took so
long to load. This text should be HTML, not image-based. I'm
not falling in love with the frame that scrolls on either page.
I think the layout in each case is successful and interesting -- I
wish the ideas were related from page to page. As it stands,
we have three awesome ideas but no echo or reference.
I think there is a technical issue with the border or padding of the
frame on the masterpieces page. Also, it seems busy. This is a
good thing if you sell it for me -- show me that you intended an
overlapping bunch of images, maybe by putting each image on a colored
field and letting those background fields collide -- rather than let me
guess that you didn't make your images small enough... I suppose
that by filling all available white space, you have shown that it
was intentional. In that case, bravo.
... really great work to see camille in crayon (which I know you
acquired elsewhere) and that idea carried into the main page.