Web and Mobile Page Design

Website created in InDesign

As you can tell from this assignment I was to create a website page design and a mobile page design for a logo that I created, specifically the homepage. Coming up with the designs and ideas wasn’t new to me as I have done this before in previous courses. I will explain the website and how I came about the design for both web and mobile.

I will first start with the website homepage. I used a bit of inspiration from Lindsay Kolowich’s article, The Anatomy of a Winning Website, to build my website in Adobe InDesign. The website is static and does not have any working links in it. This is just simply a visual on how the website will look. The first line I read in her article said “eye-catching, on-brand color schemes. Big, bold images. Striking headlines.” (Kolowich). In my web design, I made sure to put in a bold image. The image I used for the background represents people of color with naturally curly hair which the fake company I made is for curly-haired people of color. From Kolowhich’s infographic, I took away a few important things to add to the site I was creating.

The first thing was placing the logo. Of course, you would want to have the logo of your brand on the webpage unless you do not want visitors to know who you are. In the previous assignments, I created an advertisement for the company. I wanted to keep the same typography headline as the ad so the company can look consistent in marketing towards the audience. I tried to stay clear of uncluttered navigation as I placed the primary navigations equally apart from each other. Having contact information on a website is very much key to people coming to your website, trusting you more, and checking you out on social media platforms as well. I made sure to add the phone numbers, a “contact us” button, and a social media section to the footer of the website. One of the cool ideas from her infographic was to add a trust indicator to the website to show that doing business with the company was great and can be trusted. The Google 5-star rating was added to the footer on the bottom of the page.

Mobile Site created in InDesign

As for the mobile homepage, I made some features stay the same and some I chose not to stay the same. I got a bit of inspiration from an article, 5 Tips for Creating Great Mobile User Interfaces, by Parham Aarabi. On my mobile website, I wanted to make sure navigation was easy for both novice users and expert users to use. For example, I took away the middle navigation the website page had labeled “Products” to unclutter the mobile site and just kept a pull-down sidebar navigation. Taking away that feature also helped by keeping in mind of ideal button sizes for mobile users.

Creating these homepages was interesting to do and I learned a few website anatomy vocabularies along the way. I hope these homepages for both web and mobile look like the real deal to you. Thanks for reading!

Designing A Logo

Creating logos can be a tough process but an interesting one at the same time. In my class assignment, I was to think about a company or service and design a logo for it. In a previous class of mine, I focused on a company called NaturALL Club. I created a logo based off of this company but made differences.  

Before we talk about logos, Robin Landa, author of Designing Solutions explains logos as “the single graphic design solution that will be a part of every other brand design solution…a unique identifying symbol” (Landa 224). Thinking of a logo is great but sketching out different designs and thoughts is what I did for this assignment. While trying to come up with something new I kept in mind what Gui Borchert said, “A logo is the smallest canvas for storytelling” (Landa 252). 

Because the company I chose to imitate uses natural products I decided to place a tree as the “t” in the logo. The tree has a symbolic meaning which Landa says, “A logo can be based on a symbol or attribute symbolic meaning to an object or form” (Landa 255). Many people know a tree is a form of nature and growth. Deciding to use a tree as a symbolic symbol in this logo made sense due to the real company using natural products for hair care. The color scheme for my logo is brown, green, black, and white. These colors are similar to NaturALL Clubs colors but different. I chose the similar colors for the logo which I felt needed to stay because the colors are more earth and natural tones. The color green pops out to the viewer and represents nature. 

As with the type, I decided to go with something playful yet type that expressed the real company’s ideas. I kept in mind some things Landa expressed which were legibility, uniqueness, and differentiation. The logo also works well in black and white. The actual company’s logo had a bit of a playful type to it so I decided to do the same with the logo I created.   

Overall, I am liking what this logo looks like and hopefully, you do as well. 

---

References:

Landa, Robin. Graphic Design Solutions. 6th ed., Cengage, 2019.

Advertisement Design for Logo

For this assignment, I was to create an advertisement design in InDesign. For the logo I created, I imitated a logo from an existing company, NaturALL Club, named NaturALL Girls. I’ve recently learned about composition ruling in this class and used this to align the text on the ad, as well as the visuals. In the poster, I used three columns to align my text and images using the composition rules. The three columns in InDesign helped align the text in the middle of the poster ad. The columns also helped me align the headline and the logo.

As for hierarchy in this poster, I made the woman the main visual hierarchy. The text headline labeled “Join The Club” is the second biggest element and the tagline “All Things Natural. Products For All” is the third biggest hierarchy piece in the poster. I made sure to put the logo on the top right for viewers to know what company was making the ad. 

I made sure to put the woman as the top hierarchy visual because the ad is directed to people with curly hair. She is happy and seems to love the hair products by the smile on her face. The colors pop to get the viewer’s attention as well. Joining the club will make you happy as well.

Photoshop Movie Poster

In this movie poster assignment, I used many elements to get this design and it might be one of my best works in Photoshop yet. There are three main characters in this “movie” in which I tried to balance their importance. By doing this I made a hierarchy of each of the characters where the character in the foreground is the most important, the character in the middle is the second important and the character on the left is third important. The character in the foreground to the right can be seen as more important because I made a glow effect around the character. 

In this poster, I added some shadowing to some of the elements. The character on the right has a shadow effect on her behind the image. There is also a shadow under the cars to give the poster a more 3-dimensional feel to it. In the title, I used a shadow effect on the words but I gave the shadow a noise effect to complement the movie feel. At the bottom of the poster where it says “In Theaters May 5” I used a shadow effect so the date can stand out to the viewers. Though you may not know I changed the color of the cars to complement the color scheme I had in mind for the poster. Using layer masks for the two characters in black and white, I created a fade into background effect along with creating the layer mask for the blue car to fade into the background as well.

Milton Glaser Rendition: Kobe Bryant

Brianna’s Rendition using Photoshop

As everyone has heard in the news, basketball legend Kobe Bryant has died in a plane crash along with his daughter and seven others on January 26th. I have decided to create an art piece of Kobe Bryant inspired by Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan poster. As you can see in the image I have made three different color scheme renditions of Kobe’s silhouette. 

In all three of the images, I used the same background gradient color purple and yellow which represent the color of the team he played on the Lakers. But, each of the photos has a different color scheme. Each of the images has a silhouette of Kobe. Robin Landa, author of Graphic Design Solutions, describes silhouettes as “the articulated shape of an object or subject taking its specificity into account” (pg. 111) and how to achieve this is by “removing the background of an image leaving only the outline or shape of an object or figure” (pg. 118). Silhouettes are demonstrated in Glaser’s work along with the many other artists using a similar technique. 

In the first image to the left of the three Kobe pictures I primarily used the color purple to fill in the basketballs. The purple I used to fill in the basketballs is a tertiary color according to Justin Baker’s The Ultimate UX Guide to Color Design article. A tertiary color is made by “mixing primary and secondary colors” (Baker). The color purple isn’t the only color I used but I also used yellow for the strokes in and around the basketballs. Both purple and yellow are complementary colors which means they are directly across from each other on the color wheel. These two colors compliment each other so well that the Lakers decided to create their brand using the colors. 

For the Kobe picture in the middle, I decided to create the color scheme purple, yellow, gray, and white. These colors in the image are what Baker calls tinted colors. He explains it as the “result of an original color where white has been added…is lighter than the original color” (Baker). Landa would describe these colors used in this image as cool colors as well which I tried to achieve other than the first image of the complementary colors. The white color was chosen to make the shapes and design stand out more. 

In the last image that I made, I went for the colors red, blue, gray, and white. The reason behind the colors has two meanings. One of the reasons I chose this color is because it represents what Kobe meant to the United States as a basketball player. The other reason I used these colors was due to the color psychology of them. Lindsay Kolowich, writer of the article Color Psychology in Marketing explains that color psychology is “research that looks at how color influences our behavior and decision-making”. In this Kobe image, I am going for more of the behavioral influence it may have on some individuals when viewing it. 

The color red can trigger some negative or positive responses to viewers, in which this case it is more of the negative as Kobe has tragically died in a plane crash. For the color blue, I balanced this color with red as blue can be seen as a color to calm viewers and or give strength to them. As for the color white and grey, I used these colors to make the red and blue primary colors stand out a bit more to the viewer. 

I hope you as the viewer like these three different color scheme images of Kobe Bryant. The design is a bit different than Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan image as I use circles and he uses line shapes.

---

References:

Landa, Robin. Graphic Design Solutions. 6th ed., Cengage, 2019.

Kolowich, Lindsay. “Color Psychology in Marketing [Infographic].” HubSpot Blog, 2017, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/psychology-of-color.

Baker, Justin. “The Ultimate UX Guide to Color Design.” Medium, Muzli – Design Inspiration, 1 Sept. 2019, medium.muz.li/the-ultimate-ux-guide-to-color-design-4d0a18a706ed.