Project03_prelim

[James Hill]

Hello Class,
For my project 3 my choice for my terribly designed website was Roverp6parts.com. This website seems to be one of those purposely badly designed websites. So it hurt me to my core to ruin it by making it look presentable. Well I would like to say presentable but my work looks like it was done by a person who might be lacking three fingers and two eyes. I tried my best to make a decent web design out of a purposely bad design. I will say that its not all terrible, I think a place I could work on is constancy. I like my main home page for most of my designs but to keep the style on an inside page was harder than I thought. Some of the websites I based my design where
* Suburu.com
* Ford.com
* Tesla.com
* Ferrari.com
The problem is I more then likely took more of the design then what I wanted from the sites I was basing my design on. (I feel like I stole too many design ideas from the sites.) Though I did notice that most of these car dealerships look a lot a like so I think I can get away with it a-little. For the mobile side of the project the design is more on my side of originality which is why it looks basic and boring.
PS. The photo quality is bad because I used the photos from the original website and they where all real small.
Now that we are done with the reading part here are my designs for Roverp6parts.com.

Thank You :3

[Cole_Richards]

Hi James, I really like your designs, they are well thought out and the layouts are very well done, I would change the formatting of some of the images, some seem a bit squashed or stretched, I do like the colors a lot of your first design, the green is a really nice choice, to tie it in with the photo of the car. Very well done!

[kpargs]

Hi James,
I think I agree with what you said about taking your inspiration from the original, but its a lot of info to unpack and rearrange. You got this

[Fatkid53]

Holy shnikes, yeah the original site reminds me of autotrader from hell type deal, good call on the redesign. I would say I dig the second design a bit more, it is cleaner and the ui seems to be more navigable. I would think though about some background framing or color, the problem with such photo heavy sites is that if you don't frame them with blocks or organize them in concise columns then they tend to look haphazardly arranged. Otherwise its. vast improvement over the original site, nice job.

[lilykmitch]

Hi James
I think this is a big improvement from the original website. I like the layouts you have on the bottom two pictures i think they look like how it would on a real, well-made website.

[Samantha_Thomas]

This website reminds me of that Chang's Cars one that got presented in class, so it does seem to be purposefully bad.
But ignoring the picture quality as you explained how small they were initially.
I think you should go with the second design as it seems neater than the original and well more put together instead of screaming. I'm bad for attention.
It's ultimately up to you as the designer, but if you focus on the second one, you can gain back all your missing fingers that you claim to have lost.

[zandrews]

Hey There James!

Oh man you weren't kidding about the original site - it's almost a crime to attempt any improvements because the original is just so... NOTORIOUSLY AWESOME. lol jk

Great work on these first sets of re-designs! I really love how you tied in the vibrant green color of the car into your hud elements - really pops off the clean, white layout of the site. Honestly I do love the gray too though and I may have to go with that set only because I feel it will work better if the imagery is ever swapped out on the homepage (course the site could change colors when the hero image changes BUT that may also also confuse users if the site looks different to which they may have to do a double take).

I particularly love your nave bar up top on the gray one along with drop down menus - very clean way to set up the navigation! My only suggestion for aesthetic purposes is to see if you can use images of cars with a bit of a higher resolution - they're just too pixelated when you pull up the mockup (But for placement purposes these did the job just fine ). I see you used their images for the time being but because the majority of pictures are of cars rather than anything specific to Rover, I would just pull a variety of high res images from google of different types/years/makes of cars to use.

Fantastic start James! Always look forward to seeing what you come up with and cant wait to see your evolution of this website!

[squidgola33]

I really like your second go at these roughs, I feel the first one is a bit too similar to your inspirational websites. the second version is very nice and easily navigable. I like what you did to display the images in the horizontal collection of rectangles, it looks very unique and separates your website from all the other ones.

[Instructor]

I wouldn't worry too much about stealing, James. Even the best designers steal. All you have to do is make sure you're not too obvious about it. Heh!

I'm not 100% sure where one design ends and another begins, but I'm going to take my best stab at it, here.

I like the darker strip multicolumn design better than the lighter stripe single column design. It's home page is especially strong. I like the large dominant photo banner with the smaller photos notched in over the top in a little sub-gallery. It's typographically cleaner as well. I like how you've established a series of horizontal bars across the design to separate the content. By and large it uses margin well. Nothing feels too tight. I like the idea of using lot's of large images throughout instead of a bunch of text. People like images over text anyway. Your navigation is easy to see and use. I like your use of dropdown/flyout menus. Good use of a dark top bar to frame everything.

You're right about the pics being bad, especially the large ones. Feel free to source some pics from elsewhere on the internet. May instead of dark gray for the tup stripe, why not try a British Racing Green. It's both a dark color and topic appropriate to the website you're building. Be careful about making bodycopy different sizes as the larger bodycopy will be more dominant whether you intend it to be or not. I'd also eliminate the hyphenated line breaks as they can make reading difficult.

Good effort!

[Elle Barre]

James, wow, beautiful, so so nicely done. You rocketed that site from some industrial back eddy to Christie's Auction House. Really gorgeous how you remade it. I love all of it. I follow a fine automobile aficionado and dealer in England and I know he, Mr Artsy Fartsy, Jaguars, Mercedes, cars I can't remember the names of, and art museums. And he is a super snob. He would puff out his chest with pride that someone FIXED this site and gave it dignity and ART.