For project 3, we were tasked with creating a functional website for women in design. The main focus of mine was the female designer April Greiman.
Although we were provided with a pre-written text to use as the base of our design which describes Grieman’s life and career, I feel that any project should begin with research. Therefore, I conducted a little background research on Greiman. Although much of this information I found out was already in the text, I feel that I understood it more by doing personal research as I spent time really focusing on the content. Furthermore, gathering information from multiple sources allowed me to compare it to the text to ensure that all the information provided was up-to-date and accurate.
April Greiman is a Graphic Designer, born in March 1948. Growing up in New York was where she first began to become interested in the acts, since its presence is so significant there. After studying arts in Kansas beginning 1965, she wanted to expand her knowledge and skills even further, leading her to study in Basel under the influence of the Bauhaus. From her early years as a Graphic designer to the modern day, one thing that Greiman has always challenged in limits. She wanted to reach her full creating potential, pushing her towards more experimental and abstract works.
Greiman has been a designer since the 70s, however, she really became a noted individual in the design world in the 1980s. She was one of the earliest designers to incorporate technology into design. Although there wasn’t nearly as much technology, devices and software geared towards design in the 80s, Greiman continued to do what she did best— overlooked limits and reached for countless possibilities. She continued to experiment with this relationship throughout her career, playing a key role in the recognition of digital media as an excellent way of producing designs.
Her legacy on design has been significant, particularly in encouraging designers not to limit themselves and consider a range of possibilities. Similarly, she continues to inspire people to push their own creativity and not feel defined by limits.
Before jumping into my HTML and CSS, I felt that I should choose a colour scheme. Not doing so early on could lead to an inconsistent design and confusion if I went back to fix colours at a later stage, so I wanted to get this out of the way now. I wanted to go with a rich, dark plum colour as this is the same colour as Greiman’s hair colour. Of course this detail is so small that it would likely go unnoticed but the majority of users, but will create a pleasing overall design particularly if I include images. I want to use a white background to ensure maximum readability against black text so that as many users as possible can read the content with ease. For the colour of my header and footer, I wanted to go with something that contrasted with the dark plum colour of my headings, but still was visually appealing when placed next to it.
I wanted to create a concept design in Figma of what I would like my website to look like. Having this as a reference will help me when writing my HTML and CSS, as I will have an idea of where I want to place text, images, sizes and more.
Before creating my draft design on Figma, I did a rough sketch of what I’d like my site to look like based on my initial ideas.
It was difficult to present a website fully though physical sketching, so I created a wireframe to allow me to visualise my layout better.
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