More or less when I saw the original sight I was confused. We’ve been talking about intuition and mine was sheer confusion. I couldn’t decide whether or not I liked this sight. What I did to deal with this problem was break apart the main points of the sight. When I broke it down I got that instant feeling of ‘yuck’. The sight, moreover, seemed cluttered in a simplistic say and at the same time took advantage of a color scheme that is growing in popularity. For the life of me, I don’t understand why people are in so captivated by the particular color scheme. It is simply a hodgepodge of some of the most opposite colors that are in the spectrum. It wasn’t that the colors displeased the eye in a straining way it was more that they are just colors that shouldn’t be together. The background takes the darker shade of that orange to keep it exactly where it is: in the background. That in itself is fine, yet it seems that they tried to brighten it up and pull other pieces of information out. However, they made everything contrast and be bright. A lot of it is that your eyes can’t figure out where in the world they want to go. The color scheme is so overwhelming that it can confuse a viewer.
Once a person can finally get past the random array of colors they may begin to feel bombarded (that is definitely how I felt). Granted I have seen more cluttered sights in my time, but this one is so overtaken by color that your brain almost can’t handle it. It is completely overwhelming in an artistic sense. It was as though someone was out to show their creativity and just went overboard with it. What sets us apart from the crowd has to stay on the correct side of the line. If we cross that theoretical line then the crowds will dissipate because they can’t handle THAT much creativity. Then, what purpose have we served? Yes, our artwork is out there but no one will look at it. We have to manipulate the so called ‘crowd’. Give things to them in small doses; keep them wanting more. Perhaps the most overlooked principle of design is that of mystery.
The first thing I did when I redesigned the sight was to keep the basic shapes behind all of the information basic. I wanted people to feel comfortable when they looked at the sight; to an extent boos their self confidence by giving them an ever so slight feeling of being smart. Shapes are something we, as the human race, have known since our earliest school days. These basic shapes, subconsciously, allow people to feel comforted because they are involved in something they are very familiar with. This instantly gives them a high level of comfort and makes them want to delve deeper into the sight.
The next objective was simplistic, yet it takes a lot of thought to accomplish; I tackled the colors. I used dark yet warm colors to make people feel comfortable and welcome. It gave them the opportunity to look around the sight on their at their own free will instead of having their eyes ‘torn’ from place to place by a radical color scheme. I tried to make the background darker than normal, but at the same time not so dark that every color I presented against it would pop in a very bright way straining a person’s eyes. A theory I have is that: the more comfortable a person feels on a website the more apt they are to stay there. I used certain color schemes that were noticeable enough to lead the eye but at the same time not bright enough to force it somewhere. I tried to find a happy medium within those two points for the login box. I wanted people to be able to instantly know where to log in, but at the same time I wanted them to be able to ignore it if they were not there to log into a particular profile.
Now the other thing that ‘bugged’ me about the original sight was how cluttered it seemed. The first panel I thought was pretty good. It was more or less a title and a picture with an explanation of what the sight was in simplest terms. Of course, all of this was followed by the sights on version of a join button which I labeled ‘click me’. The next two panels presented a little bit of a challenge to me. They both seemed cluttered and empty at the same time. I understood what they were trying to do but at the same time they didn’t do a very good job of it. To solve the problem in both of the panels I limited them each to one excerpt of their given topic and added a ‘see more’ button at the bottom the panel. In addition, on the third panel, I added a picture to give it a little more body. Lastly, I decided to keep the buttons along the top for navigation purposes. I examined different ways to remove them but quickly realized they were essential to the navigation of the sight not necessarily on the home page but on other pages on the site.
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