Initial Website Design Ideas

Today I experimented with some simple initial design ideas for my website. My primary intention here was to begin the process of establishing a personal brand for my website and related online pages, such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Firstly, I began to consider the type of logo I will be using both on my website and across social media platforms:

Logo Concept Experiment

I wanted to put across what I do while also conveying my personality at the same time. As such I felt it would be interesting to experiment with using an animated logo of myself, created in the style in which I animate/illustrate. I thought this was quite a fun idea, as it immediately tells people that I am and animator in a way that lets them 'get to know me' somewhat. On the downside, in uploading this to my own website, I did find the animation quite distracting to have in my peripherals while viewing portfolio pages etc. If the animation was done subtly enough - or stopped after a set number of loops - this idea may have potential. Of course, in its current form this could not be used as a logo however I think the idea is certainly something to consider and possibly take forward in my final design.

Secondly, I experimented with using some of my illustration work as backgrounds to my pages:

Landing Page Idea

Above is an example of how this would work. I like this idea as it once again provides an immediate impression of the type of work I create as soon as you enter my website. There are a few issues with this concept however, firstly, getting such a background to look good on any computer is somewhat of a challenge without having the image stretch or go off screen, and secondly, text placement is awkward as a result of this. I have got around the issue of having the text cover up the focal points of the image when viewed on different devices by incorporating the text as part of the image file rather than straight text on the webpage itself, although this is still not idea.

Generic webpage background Idea

The next part of this idea was to experiment with backgrounds for the rest of the pages on my website (above). I used images from the same set as that used in the landing page to give a feeling of continuity to the site. These images were blurred slightly to make them more subdued and help to prevent the background imagery from distracting from what is in the foreground.