"Principles of Beautiful Web Design" Presentations

Here are the dates for the presentations as well as the topics.

Oct 16th
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Web Layout

Paul Symons - Grid Theory

Sarah McHie - Balance

Evan Bell - Navigation


Color

Justin Geisler - Color Theory 101

Lauren Elliott - Psychology of Color


Oct. 23
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Mitch Sanders - Creating a Palette


Texture

Danilo Santos - Points, Lines and Shapes

Michael Straub - Pattern

Cameron Kinzer - Building Texture


Typography

Rob Kranc - Type on the Web


Oct. 30
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Gabe Khouli - Choosing Fonts

Christopher Jackson - Spacing and Alignment


Imagery

Jordan Taylor - Image Sources/Creative Cropping

Robert Freeman - File Formats and Resolution

Lydia Sparling - Borders and Edge Treatment

Terrible

http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

This website is so horrible it's funny.

Jordan Taylor

Starcraft: Dated Web Design Study

Notice anything about BLIZZARD's website for their famous real-time strategy game? The Starcraft and related Battle.net websites haven't really been updated much since the game's release in the late 90s besides relevant news posts.

http://www.blizzard.com/starcraft/

The upcoming sequel, Starcraft 2, has a much more "modern" and sleek website design, complete with browser compatibility issues and random crashing from all the flash loading.

http://www.starcraft2.com/

Out of this world!

I am a closet astronomy freak and I've found this website wonderful for information! It is very well organized and easy to navigate and of course, it doesn't have any ads which is nice.

http://www.nasa.gov/

Ball State Credit Union

bsfcu.com is a website that I use nearly every day to check my bank account and pay bills online. The site has some issues. First, all the junk in the center middle of the home page looks like ads but they are links for the credit union and I've never even paid attn to them until i was closely looking over the site. Another problem is that the links on the left don't do anything to let you know that you are currently on that portion of the site. For me the site serves its main purpose but for new viewers it isn't great.

Reflecting a city on the web

Growing up in Noblesville, I've always enjoyed the fact that no matter how much the city continues to grow, it still keeps the feeling of small town. I think that the city of Noblesville did a great job of reflecting that in their website. However, what it has in design, it lacks in usability in that navigation options often change from page to page.

City of Noblesville

Everything I need to know

Quite possibly the most helpful site I have ever come across. It is a very easy to navigate site and somewhat lets you know where you are in the site with visual cues though I could do with being able to see some sort of highlight in the tab that you are in. There is somewhat of a breadcrumb trail, but it can be sort of a maze at times so it isn't really necessary.


imdb.com

Can't decide if I like this feature

www.ae.com

I went to the American Eagle outfitters website and found a useability feature I'd never encountered before. They have pictures of models wearing the clothes plastered all over the site, just like every other online clothing store. The interesting feature is that you can scroll over the model and click his clothes to buy them. I haven't seen a clothes site set up like this before.

"The Worldwide Leader in Sports"

This week I decided to go with ESPN's website.

http://espn.go.com/

I like the layout of the page, where the main story takes up most of the page on the left, article listings are on the right, and multimedia content such as videos on the far right. Each section (NFL, MLB, NBA, etc) has the same basic layout. Because each page is similar, it is easy to find the content you're looking for.

Newspaper I interviewed with

On Monday I interviewed with the St. Petersburg Times newspaper and in preparation for the interview I looked at their site: http://www.sptimes.com/home.shtml. I have never liked their site, which I have been to in the past.
I assume it is templated since it is part of a combined Web site for the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area. They have some really interesting drop down menus when you scroll across their top navigation bar. There is a lot of information to digest.
They also have way too many subject areas on their page in general, as you can tell by the small vertical scroll bar.
They do a good job in general of presenting the most important information on the top of the page. But they have a separate site for breaking news, which is weird, although I suppose not a terrible idea.
Overall the organization is OK, but the layout is not appealing.
- Gabe

Web

Found interesting Laurel and Hardy website -

http://www.laurelandhardycentral.com/

Buying Games Online

Here is a site that I have used quite a few times. Its a great site if you are a gamer and would like to find out how much your video games are worth. You can also buy games new or used and find out what new games are coming out and when they are coming out. They also sell accessories for game systems. You can have them shipped to you or you can find out if there is a local store that might have what you are looking for.

Gamestop.com