Top 3 Portfolio Projects That Challenged Me as a Designer

1. Bullet for my Valentine Band Email Newsletter

This project made me think out of the box and take a real flyer advertising a past album and turning it into a working email newsletter. Turning a print project into a web project. It can be found here. I decided to redesign a fun personal project for a top favorite metal band of mine. Instead of making up information for content, I found a flyer for their past album "Gravity" and used dates, past band guests, and tour places for content. I researched how other bands/music artists promoted and sold tickets through email newsletters or web ads for layout and color inspiration. Once I had a good online collection of inspo and ideas fresh in my mind, I started sketching wireframes to get an idea for layout and how I wanted content to appear. This helped establish a visual hierarchy for buttons, promoting the BFMV website, dates/tour places, and of course guests. After sketching was done, I took my design into Photoshop to mockup the final look. I then imported it into Dreamweaver mapping out its structure and made each button/link functional to link to another webpage.

The challenge was to take a printed design and make it a completely new and functional web design project where I kept usability, accessibility, navigation and other UX web principals in mind since it pairs with UI design. This project focuses on html for functionality.

2. Suicide Awareness Poster

This project was different than others I worked on. This is the type of design that involves a lot of data and structuring that data into a visualization that is easy to understand at a glance. It can be found here. This project was a poster where I used real data from the World Health Organization on a real statistic about deaths in the United States. The challenge was to take real data and instead of making something look and work well together, this one focuses on data and showing impact on a particularly difficult topic. This is called a data visualization. I researched topics about the United States and found one that centered on an alarming trend for a long time. Deaths have been increasing since the 1990's and have not decreased ever since (at the time of creating the poster). This created a real need for a sense of urgency to help stop or slow down the trend. Thus, my idea and sketching phase was ready. The struggle was not only was I dealing with a sensitive topic but I was also working with real data that had to be orderly and easy to understand quickly. My through process was, since this focuses on Americans, I decided to use imagery best representing Americans; and which better way then to use the symbolic American flag. I tilted the flag on its side and used the stripes to represent traditional bars similar to bar graphs in data charts. Then I added the data and call to action, "TEXT NOW TO SAVE A LIFE" to raise urgency and get people texting asap. It includes the new lifeline number.

3. Fusion Bicycles Website Redesign

This project was challenging because it is a very different layout than what you normally see on the web. You can find this here. My goal was to make the redesign stand out at a glance without interrupting the shopping and browsing experience. I collected inspiration and paid close attention to how other brands made their sites stand out on the web but be easy to navigate. This lead me to be careful about how the navigation looked and worked. I went with sleek angles throughout as well as the header/footer. I used red, orange, and black to represent energy while angles were speed. I made the navigational element organized by highlighting in red which page you were clicking to. Without a strong navigation, the user will most likely leave your site quickly since they cannot find information they are looking for quickly. I make sure to add proper alt tags to images and optimize images in photoshop for faster loading time before adding to the website. This helps increase SEO and users find things better. I kept ux principals in mind and solved the challenge by keeping organized in navigation and layout. The website stands out by not following typical web trends and instead follows its own unique design overall for standing out.