Interaction Design

These are a few of the ideas I had for lawrencefolio along the way.

lawrencefolio_sketches

My sketches are scattered accross post-it notes stuck around my house.

A few sketches of my site that I managed to round up are right here:

It’s hard to see, because my sketches aren’t very tight but I’m playing with large margins and a sloping design that starts heavy in the top-left and moves your eye down to the bottom right.

Here is the wire-frame that I ended up with. I’m a little worried that I’m creating some weird negative shapes between the margins, so I’d love some feed back.

It’s a 4 column grid, 220px per column (20px gutters).

These are just a few of my thumbnails, they just show how I want a few things to work. This is was important because I’m not sure how I will be able to have my pictures fly out of the pile and enlarge and fit to the screen. There isn’t a whole lot of complicated parts to my site, most of the pages are just based off of my gallery page. I also want to make it so someone has to download my resume, because I don’t really want everyone to see what I’ve done unless they are serious about giving me a shot at some work.

Basic things I would like to see.

This is actually the third personal website I have designed, so the content has been gathered.

During the research process I watched the video of a designer explaining important elements of a portfolio site, and looked at existing design sites. I saw a lot of portfolio sites used flash, scrolling blogs, or had a lot of type that I got lost in.

Through the research process I came up with these goals:

1. Showing the work and giving it plenty of space
2. The site needs to be quickly navigable, meaning it is easy to understand
3. Provide wanted information for an employer (resume, contact info, pdf portfolio)
4. Keep users coming back
5. Be professional and represent the content accurately

In the thumbnails I focused on these goals and how I could find a solution for all of them. After many a sketch I do believe I came up with a good solution. The idea I started with was completely different than what I ended up working the best.

Thumbnail Sketches

Here are my site sketches.

I really like the simple websites with a lot of white space and really nice typography. After doing my research I saw some sites with big photos that caught my attention right away on the main page. I like the idea of using that along with a short saying about myself to let people know what my site is about.

My site ideas

Here are some thumbnail sketches of what I think my website could be. I like the icon in the middle kinda. What do you think about it?