Narrowing Down the Palettes

This week, with the help of my coworker, I searched user-made color palettes on a site called Colour Lovers. It is a site where users create and share their own color palettes and where others (such as myself) can use them. For my updated theme for the Kukui cup site, I chose to work with the "w o r d l e s s . " theme that matches white, green, black, and beige together nicely. Through the process, I developed what I think is a nice layout, however, I am currently having problems designing a background that would match the layout. I found out quickly that using a preexisting image would be difficult as these colors are very light and pastel and would not work very nicely with the bright colors of a still shot image.

Because the Kukui Cup is about energy conservation, I want my theme to have a very "natural" feeling using greens and browns to enhance the experience. This is easier said than done. I've been spending hours looking up similar layouts to no prevail and even just going at it at designing my own. I've come up with a couple ideas that seem to work okay, but do not really match in my opinion. I feel like something is always missing. Below are some of the backgrounds I have been messing with; all designed from scratch or a preexisting image by me. The ones that look kind of weird affect the color of the container so to give it a "softer" look.

A Crash Course in Graphic Design

We're still currently working on creating a new "look and feel" aspect to the current Kukui Cup website and frankly, its been quite rough. For this entire week, I've been basically tackling various things head-on. For the Kukui Cup, I've been working on finding a color pallet that would work for the page, as well as designing a background that would be able to be nicely responsive, as well as match the overall theme of the page. Honestly, props to those who do this professionally because they must have a really good eye for color, images, and sizing of things. I was only able to create one theme this week because of all the craziness going on with my other classes. 

Although, I've been taking short notes on color pallets based on things I see elsewhere like stores, other websites, mobile, apps, etc. for colors that would seem to have a "natural" feel. The only problem now is actually implementing them into the website and making it aesthetically pleasing. This coming weekend is a long weekend, which means I'll have an extra day to work on a couple other color schemes. The hardest part seems to be finding a nice background that would match the widget-like layout of the pages. 

I'm In Control

Just like last week, we took another half-step back in the redesign of the Kukui Cup page. This, time we worked primarily on redesigning the back-end framework by ideally making it easier to make changes to all the pages at once by setting up "global" CSS files that would affect the all the pages when changed. At the same time, the plan was to also separate the "local" CSS files. This was a lot easier said, than done.

At the start of the week, I was able to more or less separate the "about" page's CSS file and originally thought that was a great idea. However, after continuing working on the others, I just confused my self and ended up starting over (which lead to much more headaches). In the end, it kind of worked out, but I feel like the theme files (which are still currently still the screen CSS file), could be broken down farther into smaller, more manageable files that would eventually lead to a smaller margin of error when making changes to the page. More could have been done, but it is midterm time and lots of stuff are going on at the same time. However, I've committed an equal amount of time to working on making sure this file structure will be as efficient as possible to prevent (or limit) bumps in the road later because of a bad file structure. I also did not have time to start looking into more color palettes (outside of the one used in the mockup from last week), but I do have some ideas in mind that I'm hoping to mess around with within the next couple of days.

Kukui Cup Redsign Challenges

So we've hit a bump on the road to redesigning the Kukui Cup Page. Its basically a "one step forward, two steps back" kind of deal. Last week, we had a crash course in responsive web design and more or less got a working page that nicely responds to the browser size, however the aesthetics of the page were horrendous. The white background and the neutral colored widget boxes made the site look bland and overall, boring. Because of this, production of the actual responsiveness to the page has come to a stop, and an overall redesign of the page aesthetics has begun.

Each of us were responsible to submit our own mockups as to what we felt the Kukui Cup page should look like. For my design, picking out a new color palette was the hardest part. The process of finding contrary colors that had a "natural, earthy" feel to it was quite difficult without running into a puke colored green or a poop colored brown. I personally have only dabbed into webdesign and graphic arts, and along with working with a graphic arts major a few years back, I learned quite a bit about Adobe Photoshop and was able to use that to create my mockup. My inspiration for my design was to keep it organized, making especially the navigation bar seem like it was one in the same with the page, by having it be part of the overall layout and not have it in it's own box floating around in space somewhere. However, with my new concept, comes new challenges. A lot of images are involved including the "tabbed" navigation bar. Making all of those responsive may be a bit of a challenge since we haven't got a working fluid image yet, but it is definitely doable.

Overall, the page came out to nearly what I wanted it, and modifications can always be made. If I can somehow get a hold of my old coworker and talk to him about color schemes that would help a lot since not many (if any) of us know anything about graphic design. If not, research about contrary colors would have to be done and I'm not sure how successful that would be. Here is what the page looked like after the first redesign.

However, after meeting with the group, and learning new constraint, especially how the "Quest" bar worked, changes to the left side bar had to be changed because a lot of text would be displayed when the "Quest" bar is used. After some redesign the page looks like this.