Web Design Forum: terydinho - Viewing Profile

Hi guys,

I did a site for a friend of the family, a fairly quick job, but I want your feedback on a few things asap please:

http://www.apollohol...o.uk/index.html

1. General look and feel
2. How does the drop down work for you - if it is broken, what browser and OS are you on?
3. Any improvements...

The main one is the drop down bar - but I wouldn't mind your thoughts on the whole site too

Cheers

Tel

BigItUp4London – March Challenge

After the HUGE success of the February challenge, I am hoping for bigger and better things for March

Brief summary
A blog style layout/design for BigItUp4London.org

Full description
BigItUp4London.org is a new online magazine for ALL things London. It will be a hub of activities, nightlife, art and culture etc… The content will be written by both professional journalists and freelance bloggers who have visited London recently.

The style should represent a cool, funky and stylish London scene without isolation any target audiences. Try to keep everyone happy. The target audience is for people visiting London on a holiday or backpacking through Europe. It will also have a secondary audience of Londoners who want to do more in their own amazing city!

Who can enter?:
Anyone who is a member of the forum can enter, no matter what your skill level is.

Deadline
30th March 2010

Rules
This is to be uncoded site. (JPG or PNG)
The image submitted must be of a reasonable size for judging
The design must be your own work.
if you need filler text you can use this site to generate it http://www.lipsum.com

How to submit your design
PM myself (Terydinho) and I will reply with my email address for you to send your design.
(I don't want to publish it to non-members )

Don't forget to add your forum name when you email me you design, as it saves me a lot of time and messing!!

And the winner is...
on April 1st (or thereabouts), the entrants to the competition will be placed into a poll, where all members of the forum can vote on which design they think is the best, the poll will be open for 1 week.

Quick side note
None of this work will be used in any way other than this competition, all work will be the property of the person who creates it…all that will change for the winner is a nice shiney badge and of course - bragging rights!
Any questions...........just ask!

Good luck and enjoy

Segments taken from the brilliant article at Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingm...icism-a-how-to/

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1. Note Your Gut Reaction, But Take Time to Explore It.

If you can’t articulate your reaction, stop there and keep it to yourself. As I’ve said, gut reactions can be valuable, but we need to explore them. Think of the last time you saw one of your favorite websites after a redesign. You may have liked it or hated it right away, but after using the website for a bit, your opinion (hopefully an intelligent one) became more moderate. Take the latest redesign of Facebook, for example. I was immediately confused. I think I actually typed something to that effect in the search field, which had been moved to where I thought the status update field would be. But I quickly found my way around and was soon comfortable with it. What’s more, the changes made a lot of sense overall. My gut reaction was expected; big changes can be disruptive, but I needed to look more closely to see that these changes were positive.

2. Learn to Articulate Your Observations, and Invite Being Questioned.

A designer should never, ever critique another designer’s work unless they are willing to have a meaningful conversation about it. This is a biggie. Expressing an opinion without offering to talk about it holds little value. You may be passionate about your craft (and your opinion for that matter), but for that passion to have much merit, you need to be willing to have a two-way conversation about it. Off-hand comments, particularly anonymous ones, are unhelpful for a number of reasons, most of which are pretty obvious. The point is simply that if you’re going to form and share an opinion, be willing to go a bit deeper and have a conversation about it.

3. Be Specific, and Offer Suggestions if Appropriate.

This is related to the last point. The more specific you are in praising or knocking a design, the more helpful you critique will be. Use descriptive terminology, speak the language of design, relate your opinion back to established principles. Think of your critique as one side of a debate in which you have to defend your opinion.

4. Always Consider Context and Audience-Appropriateness.

A personal website can be judged on how well it captures the personality of the designer. A mobile-specific website should be evaluated on a mobile device. And so on. This one can be hard, especially if you don’t know the context or audience. That said, avoid critiquing a design without knowing the context going in. Sure, by understanding visual design principles, you can critique just about any design on that level, but that’s usually just scratching the surface—helpful, but not nearly as helpful as it would be if you took the time to go deeper.

5. The Most Important Measure of a UI’s Success Is How Well It Meets Expectations.

I recently wrote about this in depth. The point is that you should judge the utility of a user interface by how well it meets your expectations. Of course, if your expectations are exceeded in some way, that’s great, too, but simply having everything behave as you expect is a good start.

6. Subjectivity Is Fine if Labeled as Such and Articulated Properly.

Following on the point about noting your gut reaction, judging a design subjectively is perfectly fine. Sometimes, even after having taken our time and knowing the context and audience and all that, a design still just doesn’t feel right. As long as you articulate that in a way that makes it clear you’re not sure why you feel that way (and if you accompany it with other helpful remarks), the feedback is probably worth sharing.

7. Don’t Neglect the Content.

Unless you take the time to use the website and to read and absorb the content, your review will likely be superficial. While content doesn’t often fall under the responsibility of the designer, it’s still a big part of the design. Judge a design based on how well it presents the content and facilitates its use or consumption. Of course, here we have one of those “it depends on the website” situations, so context is doubly important.

8. Study the Principles Used to Judge Design, and Learn the Language.

I’ve touched on this quite a bit already. It’s probably the best thing you can do to give better criticism and to become a more educated designer. In order to properly form and articulate an opinion about a design, we need to know the principles and patterns we’re dealing with. And without understanding the language, we can’t easily have a conversation about the quality of the design.

Design 1:
 design1.jpg (523.56K)
Number of downloads: 96

Design 2:
 design2.jpg (595.78K)
Number of downloads: 106

Design 3:
 design3.jpg (457.36K)
Number of downloads: 104

Design 4:
 design4.png (79.36K)
Number of downloads: 107

Design 5:
 design5.jpg (329.53K)
Number of downloads: 149

Design 6:
 design6.jpg (383.67K)
Number of downloads: 155

Design 7:
 design7.jpg (114.88K)
Number of downloads: 113



Good luck to all

Now I did consider myself to be a web designer and developer and user interface designer and front end developer and print designer and butcher, baker, candlestick maker... well sort of... anything I could get my hands on to make money really!

But lately I have been thinking of picking a route and taking it through to that magical 'specialist in my area' stage... so I have chosen Front End Developer.

What do you consider yourself to be? Do you want to be there forever?

I went for an interview this morning at a TOP london digital agency and it made me think that to get to the top, you can't be a jack of all trades and master of none, you need to be master of one and have an understanding/appreciation of others... but that is my view...


Discuss!