Restaurant Website Design Exercise...

"Brief:

You are required to produce a website with a minimum of three inter-related pages on the restaurant theme as described in Seminar 1. You have three weeks to complete!
The website can be static, animated and/or interactive. It can contain audio and film footage if required. It can be full page flash if desired but provide alternative accessible pages too please!"

I plan on producing a website for The Golden Fleece, a pub on my road that does good food and live music too. The pub seems to have strong connections with Nottingham's Left Lion, the local live music scene and also it has a strong visual aesthetic which gives me plenty to work with.

Once I've seen what's out there already, in terms of pub/restaurants websites, I'll go have a look around and take a few photos for inspiration...

Crowd Spring

While on Holiday in Slovenia I met various English people who now live there at a house party. In particular I met a freelance graphic designer who showed me something very interesting, an online market place called Crowd Spring (http://www.crowdspring.com/). Here potential buyers will post specifications for various projects they have going. Graphic designers, web designers, creatives etc. can get a hold of these specifications and submit their ideas, then the buyer will choose their favourite and pay the winning entry. These projects can pay out anything from $100 to several thousand dollars, so its certainly worth checking out.

Contrasts in Design

Design, especially in web design can swing between form and function. There is a balance between functional and flamboyant design, between html and Flash. Now I shall take an opportunity to briefly analyse these difference and see where they cross over.



indoorheroes.com -
I found this a particularly interesting website to briefly study as I indirectly know the designer. Indoorheroes.com was both built and designed by Joey Rabbitt, a freelance web designer. Personally I find this website brilliant in terms of functionality, the website is primarily a web comic and there is clear emphasis on that with a large display and clear navigation buttons in both internationally recognisable symbols and written text.
If you are looking for more than a web comic, there is obviously a lot more information to be found here, including a blog, a secure comment system so fans of the comic can interact with each other and the author and a news and articles feed. If you want to further browse this additional information there are drop down menus for filtering and sorting content, making it very easy to find something specific.

The website also crosses over and overlaps with other aspects of design, for example the option to choose from various themes. Users or clients have the ability to change the visual style of the site to suit their own tastes; this appears to be achieved through java script and css. The only flash elements used are for advertising in standardised banner sizes, although at present all banners are static jpgs.



locoroco.com –
This website promotes the Loco Roco game series for the Sony Playstation. Being flash you immediately notice that it is difficult to navigate through content quickly as you are constantly waiting between menus and as a result waiting through preloaders. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the web site is very attractive but some times the visuals can be a bit much and confusing in terms of finding specific content.

Again there is a cross over, where Flash can achieve the impossible compared to html or css. The Loco Roco website has essentially recreated a part of the game on the website, perhaps like a demo, which is invaluable in this specific context. Potential buyers would love to get to grips with the game before buying it.

Evolution of Hexademic New Media

Whilst browsing through the OEP Ning, I found Shaun Belcher has added an Industry tab. Here I found several links to new media firms in the east midlands, one in particular called Evoluted. At first I found the website a little corporate and stale but after viewing their portfolio and reading through their content I realised I could learn a great deal from these guys, especially in terms of features and functionality. Hexademic New Media needs a website and I think this has finally inspired me to start building it.

Edit: I also found this very interesting www.erskinedesign.com

Web Design Assignment

I've started making progress on the web design assignment (a three page html site with three flash objects). I have been drawing up designs in CSS using my new scratch built CSS template. Its proving to be a faster way of drafting designs than photoshop. See my current progress here.

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/about/

Interaction Design - Firework Safety

Much like my fireworks banner, my flash lecturer David Downes has set me another design task. This time a multiple slide flash animation promoting firework safety. The project must have between 6 and 8 flash sections that include both animation and interaction.

I have several design ideas already, all of which are centered around "The Firworks Safety Code" that I found on saferfireworks.com.

My favourite idea so far is a virtual safety guide, a book that you click on to open and presents you with the 10 rules of the fireworks safety code. I have literally just been set this task so of course no ideas are set in stone yet, I will post some initial ideas when I have them.