The Design: How far we have come

It was been a while since my last blog post. This is mainly due to the amount of time we have spent on creating the actual website and producing the content to fill the website.

Since we first created our design mock-up, both hand drawn and in Photoshop like below, we have changed many different parts and the majority of the design, to a point where it looks also completely different to first planned.

This is due to many changes in ideas and also inspiration from many different locations, including many already existing websites such as The Discovery Channel and Comedy Central.

Our first design for the website was hand drawn and on squared paper to help plan out the design as accurately as possible.

We decided to keep the design as simple as possible, but focus on user interactivity and dynamic content, things that keep the reader on the website for as long as possible.

The large box on the page cycles through a selection of images, which the user can click on to be taken to separate pages for each of the programmes.

The other, smaller boxes contain images and text that describe the channel and its content.

The second image shows the first colour mock-up of the website that we made. The colours in this image are the colours that we originally chose for the design, as we believed that these stand out against each other and go well with the genre of our channel and its mise-en scene.

The greens chosen stand out a lot against the dark grey, creating a bold impression, very much like the type of channel that we have created.

The use of a darker green for the logo helps it stand out further and makes it one of the first things you see, keeping the name and logo of channel in your head.

The first version of the website we created was a little different to what we first planned in our mock-ups. Firstly, the colours have changed from a green and grey combination to a blue and dark grey. These colours stand out as much as the previous set but we believed they went better with the genre and mise-en scene of the channel.

However, the layout is very similar to the one that was first planned, keeping to the simple and easy to use layout.

The next step in the creation of the website changed the design quite considerably. The colours were stripped and cut the design down to a very simple thing, using only black, white and small bits of blue.

One large feature of the website was complete at this stage though, the image slideshow, which make up a large part of the page.

The next stage saw a vast amount of work being completed, including the remaining parts of the design and the content that fills it.

This stage kept with the black, white and blue colour scheme but added a pattern background image, giving the page a more informal appearance.

Many key features were also added to this version, including a programme guide, schedule and an about page.

These steps have lead to this, the most recent version of the website. Not much has changed since the last version, apart from a few minor additions to the content and a few fixes in areas.

However, the background image has changed once again, now a gradiant changing from one shade of blue to a lighter one. This creates a more friendly appearance to the website and also injects a bit more of the blue into the design.