Studio Practice: Goalz: Website Design

Research: What Attracts Young People?
Asking around a class of 40 students around 19-22 what attracts them to a campaign
Answers:

non patronising language
clear brand - if it looks professional but not corporate
cool imagery (asked to expand) like 'urban' less corporate
relaxed
if everyone else is doing it
looks modern & reliable
has interesting videos
really like portfolio websites - so like photography and art pieces (it's nice that)

Visual ideology of Goalz branding to follow for the website design:

Shape: circles - curvature outputs instead of square when possible
Colour: orange, yellow & blue
Type: Circular std (Book, Bold, Black) accordingly with hierarchy
Tight kerning - connoting tight knit community / togetherness

Wix was a really useful software to use for the website design, as it allows completely freedom to the designer. I was able to translate a lot of the planned ideas for website into practice.

The initial design experimented with a load of various backgrounds, from nature landscapes to more cityscapes. The idea was to use relevant strong imagery to attract a creative & youthful audience (TA 16-25y/o). Depicting attractive imagery of earth helps to momentum of the campaign to preserve and sustain. The imagery wanted to be blue orange or yellow and so this was explored along with various opacity and coloured filter settings.

The button design choice:
explored various options however concluded on the oval shape and in block orange to keep in line with the design decisions of the brand (circular when possible).

The website design progressed from more dull and random to a coherent structure and visual identity, keeping the same background image when relevant, with few changes as possible.

Placing videos and relevant links that had been gathered in the research stages was efficient and effective.

Using the Goalz identity for the about page - the front of the postcard series - keeps inline with circular themes and adds a youthful informality to serious topics.

Adding events that present the sort of variety Goalz seeks to cover in terms of economic, environmental, social and political sectors of sustainability.

Peer Critique:

positive:
- coherent colour scheme
- approachable identity
- professional appearance and functions well

edit:
- bigger wiriting (14pt - 16pt)
- more spacing
- edit events page - more responsive to user

Response / development:

Slideshow:
The intro slideshow was a nice extra touch to add elements of interaction with the user through animation. This slows them down and more subtly feeds encouragement for them to get on bored the campaign.

Changed the background to block colour instead of imagery to make it simpler for the viewers brain to absorb everything. All the imagery seemed too overwhelming and overpowered the information.

The events page was adjusted inline with feedback to make the flow more clear. The colour scheme is continued and social media sharing links were added to encourage promotion and sharing.

The projects page would be where users could go to explore volunteer work and reliable charities - with much exposure of NGOs and big companies having adverse effects on their charitable goals, its important to include a forum where Goalz is used to validate schemes and charities, so that students can get involved with appropriate organisations (in their summer holidays for instance).

Explore: Documentary Page

The documentary page is the driving force of the website. This feature needed to function well for it to be effective in drawing in an audience. The design sought to keep it as stylish as possible to encourage the TA to not feel like they were studying. If the design was to progress it could event include Netflix links or with sponsorship from education sectors maybe even house certain documentaries itself.

The ease of transitioning and buttons (only 2 clicks necessary), as well as clear synopsis and linkage directions, makes the User Experience particularly relaxed.
The colour scheme too assist the tranquil and playful attributes of the overall web design.

The grass-roots ideology is furthered by the suggestions button which encourages the user to get involved and share, this in a psychological sense, could motivate them to look into the goals, and see if they know a good resource that is missing.

Again experimenting with different styles and shades of orange

Made the Goals larger in size to achieve greater sense of hierarchy and clarity between sections as there is around 3 goals to a page. This enables better balance.