Evaluation of designs (from sketchbook).

I began with some initial sketches of design ideas in lecures, seminars and free time in which I had a pen and paper available. These ideas became exciting and as you can see I have rooted off from these into my seven design proposals, all of which have a range of different Flash aspects, Styles, Sizes, Images and Multimedia. I have tried with my proposals to create a site which meets the brief given at the start of the project. This includes the following;

- A theme in which I can base my ideas upon: This theme for me is fashion. The site will be a collabaration of different high street branded products, packed into one site. The site will act as almost a personal University shop assistant, advising students on the top fashion styles currently in high street shops. These shops will be decided during the final design process.

- Three Flash elements: As you can see from my designs I have managed to design a range of different Flash ideas which will be both interesting to the user and useful in providing interesting content. The designs include drag and drop functions, photo slideshows, interactive scrollbars and animated buttons. The Flash elements will form a basis for my final design. All will be in .swf format for simple exportation.

- Three pages: The design ideas use three pages of content. All have an introduction page, with a loading bar, and then route off to the Mens and Womens pages.

- Maximum size 10mb. The size of the site will clearly be found when I create the final piece, but I am confident that it will not exceed the restricted amount.

With all these considerations in mind I have decided that my favoured design is the first I sketched out. The page begins with a loading bar, which takes the user directly to a page with a large photo slideshow to the left of the page, and a description of what the site is all about to the right of the page. For this page, I will use text which is in a handwritten style as if written by myself. The background will be dark, contrasting with the bright vivid colours of the slideshow images, and the text white. More information on this page will be given later on in my final design process.

Under the information about the site, I will have two animated links which take the user to the desired page, whether male or female. These two pages, will give advice on specific items which are currently popular in the world of fashion. However, this will be done in a clever, different manner to the average site. The clothes will be presented across the page inside a long JPEG image, which the user can scroll across the page to view. This will mean that these pages will be very long to compensate for the content. The JPEG image, will be sorted by the time of the day, for example morning clothes will clearly be loungers or pjs, whereas evening dress is clearly shirts or dresses. This will flow from the left (morning) to the right (evening) with links to different stages to the left of the page. By clicking on these links the user will jump to the different stages of the JPEG image. The interactivity of the JPEG image will invlove the user hovering over a specific part of the JPEG, and a small pop-up box appearing on the image to give information on that specific item of clothing.

I feel that my final design meets the brief given, as well as challenging me to create a piece which is complax yet highly interesting.

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