Weekly Design #14 - 404

Sorry for the late post, but I ended up being a little busier than I had hoped.  Since emotional design can apply to just about everything, I wanted to share a small example from a project I am working on.  I have been in the process of re-writing my website and as part of that I have had to ensure that everything looks and feels as professional as I can, while still portraying the messages and feelings that I hope to get across.  One of the pages I have built is designed around the 'Error 404' message that is given when you browse to a page that doesn't exist.  Normally this page is plain and doesn't have any real ties to the website you were looking for.  The goal of designing a new site is to give my users a better experience when they hit this page.

The design is plain and clean, keeping consistent with the overall look I hope to achieve for the site.  The text is straightforward, but also much friendlier than the computer generated text that is normally displayed.  Finally, it offers the users a chance to go the the main page of the site, or to let me know if there might be a problem.  All of these factors will hopefully lead to better experiences for those who see the page.

So here is a look at the error 404 page content.  Let me know what you think.

No Post Today

Just letting everyone know that there will be no post today, so check back next week for post 14.

Weekly Design #13 - I Love Design

One of the more powerful aspects of a good design is the emotional connection that is formed between the design and the viewer.  The ability to effectively incorporate emotional design into any work not only makes the design more memorable, but also changes the way we view it.  It also is an aspect of design that can be extremely broad in its implementation, giving the designer more freedom.

For the rest of July, and possibly August, I am going to be focusing on including emotional design principles into the weekly posts.  To start things off I thought it would be fun to do a post about how I love design, using the classic "I Love *insert topic here*".

Let me know what you think.

Weekly Design #12 - Star Spangled Banner

Because it is the Fourth of July this weekend, I wanted to do something a little different.  I threw this image together, and while I know it is not finished yet I wanted to post what I had done.

Since it is a little rough, it looks a little better when zoomed out.  You can get the gist of what I was going for though.

Enjoy!

Watchtower - Update

I spent a little more time playing with the drawing, and made some changes based on feedback I got.  This change was done to help make the perspective better, and to help the overall composition.

Weekly Design #11 - Watchtower

I'm sorry that this is the first (and probably last post) for June, but life has been keeping me busy.  I have been working on a drawing for the last week or so, but I never got around to posting anything.

This drawing is unfinished but is turning out pretty nicely so far (I think).  It still has a long ways to go, but you should be able to get the gist of it.  It is supposed to be some kind of a watch tower.  I used various asian buildings as reference to give it a slightly different look than I might normally do.

Anyways, let me know what you think.

June's Design Theme - Concept Sketches

Since I have been doing typography(ish) designs for the last two months, I have been feeling that it is time to change things up and do something a little different.  When I started this project at the beginning of the year, the goal was to help motivate me to 'design' things.  Since the word design is so broad, I have tried exploring some of the different things that I believe the word encompasses.  In that though, for this month I want to work on concept sketches, or the idea of doing a quick sketch of something and then elaborating on it.  While I don't consider myself to be a great artist, and these works will probably be very basic, I think that this will be a fun change from what I have done so far.

Look for the first of these sketches this weekend (probably tomorrow).