I know what you did last summer (part 2)

One of the things I designed while working for the IT department, was their website portal. It was just awful (white page with blue hyperlinks) and needed a revamp. I created over a dozen maquettes and one of them was chosen by the employees after two rounds of votes. I was surprised to see that the IT employees had chosen a really dark background since the college identity is dominated by a light color palette, but hey… that’s democracy for ya! I have no clue as to when the page will be implemented within the college website. NOTE: All these designs were created with Adobe Illustrator.

 

Discarded (some of my designs left out of the vote)

 

First round (my designs included in the vote)

 

Variations of the chosen design

 

Final choice

 copyright 2011

School project S4: Student web portal

This project was an actual contract for our school student web portal. We (the 2nd year students) had to design something that wasn’t corporative and felt younger. We each created several maquettes in photoshop and chose the one we wanted as our official prototype (Html/CSS). The latter would be judged for this competition and graded by our teacher. Here are my four maquettes and my official submission (see below).

This is my first concept (called “concrete”), and now that I think about it, the one I should have chosen as my prototype. I think my chances to win would have been greater. This concept was one of the few that was made an example of by the teacher after the disappointing first round of submissions.

I don’t quite like this concept (called “Graphic Pizza”) because it is too busy. But from what the teacher told me, the clients found it interesting because of the icons which would be good for an iPhone version of the student web portal they were thinking about creating. The teacher did not like that one at all. 🙂

This is my favorite concept (called “Black board”),… and the teacher’s favorite also. I like this one because it reminds me of my old days in school (late 80’s). Unfortunately, the client though it was too dark/black for the color palette of the school identity. Good point.

So I changed the “Black board” concept to the “White board” which is closer to what we see nowadays in classrooms. The light color palette works better with the identity of the school and so I decided that this would be my official prototype for the competition. A big surprise would be next. The client announced that the design students (our class) would be choosing three finalists and those three student designs would be then submitted for the school vote (all students). It was an extremely tight finish for the 3 finalists in which I was a part of. Unfortunately I didn’t win this competition, but one of my closest friends did.

 copyright 2011