Introduction
In this blog I will be writing about all of the design tools I used to design my website, for example the tools and purposes of QSEE, Colour palette, fonts etc.
Colour Palette
For deciding the colours for my website I decided to use Adobe Kuler, adobe Kuler allows user to try and save various colour schemes, each consisting of five colours. It also provides 'colour rules' which contains all the basic colour rules. I decide to go with 'complementary' colours; these are the colours that complement each other. For example a dark background with a bright font, making it easier to read and vice versa. For my website I decided to use purple and yellow as yellow would show up brighter on a dark purple background.
Fonts
Font selection tools provide a wide range of font styles to form for your website. I decided to use Google fonts for my website. Google fonts allows me to pick any font I want and makes it easy as it requires no sign-up, it’s open source and free, and the deployment of fonts is fast. One thing they offer is the ability to download their fonts to desktop for use in design stage.
Wire frame/QSEE
Wire-framing tools are used by web designers to predict the layout of a website once it is finished, and give an idea of what the website should look like. In designing the future layout of my website I used QSEE & Lumzy. I used QSEE to design the navigation chart for the web pages. This navigation page described which web pages were linked together, and why they were linked. When I was designing the navigation chart it was important that each page was linked to the homepage index, as that is the starting page a user will see when they first enter the website. Later I used Lumzy to design the layout of each page. This included but was not limited to the positioning of the navigation bar, the logos and the layout of the actual content of the website, which was information about Penguins.
Graphic Program
Illustrator is a high end image editing software, and since I have already used illustrator for other units I decided to use illustrator as it would be much quicker since I won’t need training in new software. In illustrator I used the 'pen' tool to trace over an image which I have taken from Google image. The image was of a penguin which I used as my logo. I made my website design simply by using boxes and lines which I then coloured accordingly.
