Graphic Design

Before engaging in my own practice graphic design projects, I sought out a website with poor graphic design so that I would have an idea of what the fatal errors (or "sins") discussed by Golombisky & Hagen look like.  I didn't have to search long.  Most websites I visited had at least two no-no's somewhere on the site, but some were quite horrendous.  One such site is for Video Sonic, which specializes in video and audio equipment repair (although I did have to stare at their homepage for quite a while to figure that out, let alone what the same of their company even is).

Where to begin on this?  First, the company's name is so tiny in the corner that, like I said, I couldn't figure out who they were at all.  The next thing that jumps out at you is the enormous amount of negative space dead center in the screen.  I waited for a while thinking that the page just hadn't fully loaded.  If they're wondering what to put there, I would suggest to relocate their company name to that spot.  Next, the navigation is very sporadic (and some of those boxes aren't links at all).  The next "sin" is that they centered everything, which gives the page a horrible look.  Some things can be centered, but the navigation should be a list and there shouldn't be one credit card logo hanging out below the rest.  While we're on that, why is the credit card info smack between the links to their individual locations' websites? - And if you're now thinking that the individual websites look better than this simple portal, you're quite mistaken.  Next issue: they've decided to go with dark colors for the foreground and the background, which means you need to strain to see the words.  Of course those ugly white boxes randomly spewed on the page do assist slightly.  The one set of boxes that do pop out are their coupons, which they have decided to paint the brightest colors they could find, leaving the color scheme very unbalanced.  They also need to fix some of their links; if you click the chatroom, you'll be the only one there.  I could probably go on for a while, so I'll call it quits here.



Then I began some practice graphics of my own.  Both are activities from Krause's Design Basics Index.  The first is a Mini Compositions exercise which was relaxing to play around with.  Basically, each rectangle is supposed to include geometric shapes.  Some I used the computer to draw straight lines and others I free-drew (I'm sure you can't tell which ones I carefully drew without computer aid...).

The second activity was to develop three ads displaying a form of repetition in each.  Each ad has some good qualities, and I admit that I can see areas in each that can use improvement as well.  I won't bias you, though, so I'll let you comment on good/bad qualities at will.

Please leave comments on what you think about my first art since high school.  Like I stated above, there are pros and cons with each one; feel free to point out areas that are in need of improvement!