





After attending his lecture, Ira Glass is my new favorite person. I was very impressed and just blown away by his performance at Hendricks Chapel back in the beginning of November. I use the word performance because he did more than just lecture the audience that evening: he told us stories, he played clips from past interviews, he even played background music. He was very funny and he mesmerized the audience with his great storytelling abilities.
He opened his performance with all the lights off and talked about how the radio is an excellent medium for storytelling because the lack of visuals forces the audience to listen. He then went on to talk about how archaic traditional journalism has become because it no longer tries to engage the audience. Glass also discussed his method for storytelling that gives action followed by another action and then a thought so that it keeps the audience intrigued with constant bait.
Overall I really enjoyed Glass’s presentation. He has an amazing knack for finding stories in the most pedestrian of places. And after becoming so accustomed to the banal, monotone voices of most broadcast journalists today, it was very refreshing to listen to someone just sound so human.
Though initially I was going to make a much more complex website, I remembered who my audience is supposed to be. This site is just going to be looked at by a small number of people from my town, likely from a link from the high school site. With that in mind, I kept my school colors as the two main colors for the site, blue (R: 12 G: 37 B: 146) and gold (R: 163 G: 174 B: 65). Though I thought of using more holiday colors, or even just more white, I decided to stay with what the school knew best, their own colors, especially since I thought the blue background worked well.
All the possible information is up on the website. I tried to stretch it out as much as I could, but when all was said and done, this was all the information needed for the toy drive. If I had added anything more it would have been useless and fictitious. By giving the readers contact information, informing them what the drive is about, and telling them how to donate and volunteer, a simple yet efficient website is created. Also included are links to a facebook group for the event and a way to download the poster.
On the header, “Roxbury High School” is in Joanna MT Std, a serif that complements well with the “Annual Toy Drive” in Ocean Sans Std, a sans serif. The navigation bar is in Helvetica as I just wanted a simple, clear typeface that did not draw much attention to it. For the body type on each page I used Verdana, which I thought fit well on the page since it is not very flashy and easy to read, and if the school chooses to use this site, can be shared by Macs and Windows.
When all is said and done, the intention of this website is simply to inform my high school about the toy drive. I want them to be able to go on the website, and feel like they are right at home, like it is part of the school. I also wanted them to walk away with no further questions. I believe I accomplished both of these goals.
Entrance Page-I wanted my entrance page to look like an invitation you would get in the mail. I used the event as the seal that would be on the invitation to give an idea of what the site was about. I also used a piece of the border from the invite to frame the page and break up some of the white space.
Other Pages-I made my banner to mimic the poster that I used for the event in a more scaled down version. I included just one on the invited border as to not crowd the white space but lead the reader’s eye to the title. The banner for the links is the same pattern from the entrance page and they would turn black when active to match the color scheme. I incorporated the black and white pattern from the entrance page as a background like you suggested. I used the same invitation format with a bit of transparency as a container for all of the even information. I then included a link to the Dunbar site with their logo and slide show of the children. I wanted to include pictures of kids to give a face to the children the event was for, I also wanted to make the side donor and search friendly do I included a sidebar on every page with that option. For fonts I used Helvetica because the Dunbar logo used that font and I did not want a ton of different front, and it is a very functional font. I used Ruziicka as a script font to look like an invitation but also add readability. I also used the Zaphino font from my original poster. I did use a different font called Bickhan Script. I wanted to use the font throughout the site but it lacked readability; large and as a single line it functioned well.Design Strategy:
I chose to use the same event for my web site that I used for my poster project. That event is the Kappa Karwash which benefits Reading Is Fundamental. In using the same event I wanted to play off of the soap bubble theme that I used in my poster. I used to soap bubbles ad the link on my navbar to add interest and creativity, but also because it makes the link stand out and they become more user friendly. To distinguish which page was being viewed I put sponges on either side of the soap bubble link to that page. I wanted my web site to be simple, user friendly and clutter free so I wanted to make sure I used white space and didn’t cover every inch of the page in color. On my directions page I overlaid a blue fleur di lis over the star on the directions page indicting Kappa Kappa Gamma because that is the symbol of the sorority. Overall I tired to keep the images, text, and layout as simple and minimal as possible as to not overwhelm the user.
Typeface:
To give my web site a simple, clean, and streamlines feel I chose to use sans serif fonts that were on the lighter side. The font used in my header is called Castorgate and was downloaded from dafont.com. Aside from the header it is used only one other place which is on the home page. I stacked the type next to Kappa Karwash in 18 pt. to effectively fit it in. The rest of the type on my five pages was all Helvetica Neue in either regular weight or LT Std 57 condensed. I chose to use Helvetica because it is such a perfect font that it would not distract attention away from the information on the web site or clutter it.
Color:
I chose to use a blue theme for my web site, since the soap bubbles that I used from my poster were blue but also because the colors of Kappa Kappa Gamma are light and dark blue. I also thought that blue would be a safe color choice and not too crazy or hard to work with. The other color that I chose to offset the blues was yellow because the sponges were yellow and the warm color contrasted well against the cool blues. The blue and yellow used throughout the five pages tied the whole web site together and really created the crisp, simple, and streamlined look I was going for. The shade of blue used on the stacked part of the header to the left of Kappa Karwash is RGB:152, 202, 241. The dark blue used throughout the five pages as the background container, navigation bar, and the header “Kappa Karwash” is RGB: 89,139,240. The stroke outlining the soap bubbles is RGB: 17, 191, 218. The color inside the soap bubbles and also used on the contact and about pages is RGB: 191,231, 247. The color used to emphasize that certain pieces of type are links is RGB: 10, 1, 128. The shade of yellow used throughout the five pages is RGB: 248. 213, 74. The sponges used on the navigation bar are made of two shades of yellow, a darker RGB: 249, 198,6, as well as a lighter RGB: 252, 198, 6.