Over the course of a month we were asked to design a website for a local company. The final product would be a homepage and four inner pages with a clear design concept and functioning user interface. I chose an independent bookstore in Williamsburg called Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, Inc.
One of the concepts I developed for the website was the "Serendipity Machine." On the original Spoonbill & Sugartown website, they describe themselves as a place that has "an element of serendipity - you never know what you will find." With this in mind, the Serendipity Machine is essentially a random shuffle of products (usually rare items) that are currently in store. When the user arrives at the homepage they are given the option to start the Serendipity Machine and learn more about the store's collection. The first three pages below show the stages of flash animation that would occur on the homepage when the Serendipity Machine is started.
Homepage (in three stages):
Inner Pages:
Anny, I love this - the idea for the serendipity machine is so great, and your idea for the website is much more quirky and interesting than the actual current one, while still being totally functional and user-friendly! - Sonni
ReplyDeletethanks, sonni! i had a lot of fun with this project. i happened to pick an easier company where i really had total freedom to make it as quirky and whimsical as i wanted. though i'm not sure if my website would actually be realistic in terms of coding (according to a certain web developer i know haha). that's the other aspect of web design i eventually need to learn - how to turn my whimsy designs into actual functioning sites!
ReplyDeleteWhat you wrote made me think of something I read at SwissMiss blog:
ReplyDeleteAlmost every novel I read makes me want to write, just as most cookbooks make me want to cook and many photography books inspire me to take photos. I have yet to come across any inspiring books on web design, though, and I suspect it’s because web designers don’t do as much pure design as the title implies. In other words, perhaps web design has failed to become an artistic medium and simply lacks the material to make an inspiring book.
So I wonder if web designers could become better designers if they emulated the Architect’s system of getting an engineer’s opinion only after his or her imagination has been inked on paper. That is, perhaps we should free ourselves from writing html and css as a profession. Such a strategy might have a better chance at reproducing the radical genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, if only because web designers could stop handicapping themselves with their fascination with code and the limitations code implies.
Web / Design: A Novice’s Thoughts, by Saha