The Beautiful Meme: Day Five & Six

Another day at The Beautiful Meme studios and I seem to have Greg McGee as a sole client which, if you met him, is very interesting and quite bizarre at the same time. Today I was briefed and set to work on a website for accordingtomcgee.com which is the gallery's home page used to advertise new events and sell 'art multiples'.

Ben explained the way the site would operate and I had to come up with something based on the existing websites I'd been given as ones the client liked, and formulate designs that could be passed on to a programmer. The site had to run inline with the brand that TBM had created and also had to be user friendly. Ben was keen to see how the speech marks, two blocks that had been incorporated into the publicity material, would work as part of the website.

My initial ideas were to have a full bleed image of the artists' work and basically recreate the poster design in a web environment. Using one block for the links and the other for the content. After mocking it up and printing it, we all were not sure that it would work. Ben also highlighted problems that had existed as part of the poster designs that the artists didn't like their work covered in such a way.

I went back to square one and tried to do something without the speech marks which all centered around a gallery that could be scrolled horizontally across like a real art gallery. This had the potential to be a strong idea, as each image could be a variety of orientations and sizes and still conform. Ben was a little worried about the complexity and the way that it could be seen across platforms. By the end of the day my head was aching and I was out of ideas. trying to take someoneelses vision and create it was difficult, and these problems persisted due to my lack of knowledge about the client, the subject matter, and how websites work across platforms.

Day 5 began and Ben had overhauled the website and come up with a very simple design with a centered style which could work at any resolution. The navigation was set along the bottom and the speech marks were used to house content, similar to what I had introduced in my first set of designs. Again, I went to work on the website and found that the best solution to have the content spread across the two marks and keep the navigation at the bottom, this meant there was more space for content. After tweaking, and more print out critiques I had something that was working nicely, and soon mocked up the remaining pages including the shop, the contact page and the student page.

Day 5, a glorious Friday ended at the pub. I felt part of the team and I was happy with what I had achieved in the end. On a side note the studio itself had some really good news by securing a record high contract which they are planning for now. Exciting times are coming to TBM studios.