Logo Ideas

Paul Rollin's photography website has influenced me to create a logo page which will be the first thing someone sees when entering my web address. I was intrigued by the elegance, professionalism and slight suspense building up to the reveal of the homepage.

These are some of my initial ideas, obviously they're not 'brilliant', they were just some scribbled down ideas I came up with. I'm interested in mixing the rabbit 'hop' concept with the camera element to photography.

My Idea

It took me while to think of an idea of what kind of theme I wanted my site to follow but once I thought of this I couldn't see my website looking any other way. Since my name is Toni Hopley I wanted to play on the whole 'Hop' aspect of it so I thought that rabbits would be a memorable and clever theme. I asked a few people what they thought about this and received mixed feedback, some people said the rabbits might distract people from the main reason for the site which is photography but some people said it's a good idea and as long as they're subtle and don't scream out ''LOOK AT ME'' then it was a good route to take. I decided then on to carry this idea forwards and begin designing my site and logo.

Website Reviews

In order to get an idea of what I wanted my promotional photography website to look like, I reviewed some websites that are already running, I decided to review a mixed genre of sites to give myself more and different ideas rather than just sticking to looking at photography websites. With my aim in mind 'To design and create an easy to use, interesting and memorable self promotional website that shows my best work in order to attract future clients. My website will portray my personality so my viewers can get an idea of what I'm like as a person as well as what my style of working is.' I began to research!

http://www.jimcarrey.com/

This is the loading page, this is what we first see after typing the website address in.

This is the homepage, this is the first thing we see after the 'slow' loading page.

This is the filmography page.

The little circle in the middle is a countdown which starts at 9, it appears after clicking on a button on the page which takes you to another page.

This is a moving scene which sometimes occurs within the page transaction process.

This is a promotional website for the actor Jim Carrey, I have been on this website in the past and have always remembered what it looked like which shows it’s quite memorable. The site is full of colour, silly noises, animations and humour which is a perfect match to Jim Carrey’s personality. The homepage is full of animated images bursting with ‘life’ and colour which immediately grabs and keeps our attention. The homepage is made up of some of the characters that Jim Carrey is best known for which I think is a great promotional technique and it gives us an automatic connection with the site as we know and love these characters. The busyness and fact that there’s something different going on at all times keeps the viewer entertained but in my opinion there is too much going on at the same time making it confusing as to where we should be looking first, there’s no order. Each page fits my screen without scrolling down and sideways which makes it easier to see everything the way it’s supposed to be seen without parts cut off and hidden. Personally I’m not a fan of websites that have forced media, especially audio because they do seem too forceful and demanding, to me it feels as though the website is making me to listen to something that I normally wouldn’t choose to listen to. Noises on websites can be quite irritating, especially if they’re repetitive. This website has a compilation of repetitive sounds which at first I was interested to explore and locate where they were coming from but after less than a minute I turned my sound off because it was annoying me too much. This site plays a constant musical tune in the background with frequent bursts of random noises such as birds tweeting and bread falling into the leaves of a tree… 

There is an easy to use navigation system at the bottom of the screen, it is easy to use and does stand out from the chaotic background. I was thankful for the clear navigation system because on the rest of the page there are multiple clickable animations that when you hover over them they contort and some make noises but there is no indication to what these random images lead to if clicked, I found this very frustrating to use as I would often find the ‘buttons’ lead to pointless things which have nothing to do with what I as a client would use the website for, for example, one of the animations lead me to another page of random annoying animations which also did nothing that was important to me. Each page was differently themed yet still linked to each other because of the outrageous, montage style look that they all shared which I thought was important for the site to have because already with the crazy styling it would seem foreign to us so by having a mutual design per page gives us some comfort and familiarity. 

I would like my website to show my personality as strong as this one shows his but without making it seem ‘all about me’ when ideally I’d like my work to be the main focus. I will make sure to not over complicate my site as this would lead to confusion for the viewers which would then lead to them giving up and closing the tab. I would like to have a silly/funny element to my site like this one does but without it taking the seriousness and professionalism away too much.

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The second website I reviewed was a photography site because it makes sense to research the field before going into it yourself.

http://www.paulrollinsphotography.com/

This is the first thing we see after typing in the URL. It's his logo which then gently fades into becoming the homepage. We don't see the logo again.

This is the homepage. My cursor is hovering over the 'Spaces' categories. 

This is what I was taken to when I clicked on one of the categories.

The first thing that’s brought to our attention is the logo, it’s on a white background and is professional looking, elegant and serious but not boring, it then fades away and the homepage is revealed, this is forced media used well. The disappearance of the logo forces you to stop looking at it and the fading drags you into the website, the site already has your attention. The site is fit to my screen without my having to scroll anywhere to see parts of it. 

The most important element of the site which is the photographers photography is in the middle of the homepage and is very big which draws attention right away. The bodies of work are within rectangular buttons with curved edges which gives them a friendly look as apposed to the angry, sharp look a ridged edge would give. While hovering over the buttons the title of each one comes up on the top left corner of the image so the title as well as an example of an image from that body of work make it clear to us what sort of images we will see if we navigate to that page via that button. There is also a very simple worded buttons at the bottom of the screen if this would be the viewers preferred approach to navigation. We have 3 ways to view the photographers images, we can either click a ‘+’ sign on the right which moves the images along or we can view all the images at once as thumbnails or we can watch them in a slide show, I like this versatility as it would reach out to a wider range of people as we all like to view images a different way. 

This site is very simple which makes it look professional but I would like my site to be less serious an focus more on my personality and the fun side of what I do. I don’t see much of the photographers personality reflecting through the design unless he’s a slightly boring and serious individual. I am a big fan of giving the viewer a ‘taster’ of what they will see if they follow the link they’re hovering over to save them time and make it easier to find what they’re looking for on my site. 

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http://www.carisma.me.uk/

This is the 'Carisma' homepage.

This is the 'About' page.

From the first glance of this website I couldn’t tell what it’s purpose was, not even the title/logo/URL gave me any indication of what this website was for. It was through reading information on one of the pages that I found out it was a charity which helps young people stay away from a life of drugs, violence and crime. The colours seem very child like because of the pastel background on the homepage and multicoloured title but as the site has a serious message I don’t think these colours work. Overall I don’t think this site is visually appealing at all because of the squashed in layout, washed out colour, blurred images on the slide show on the homepage and the long paragraphs of small and almost unreadable text. 

The navigation system is easy to use due to them using words we understand and because it’s near the top of the page under neither a bright beaming title which makes our eyes already look towards the top of the screen. Although the navigation system is easy to use I think it looks very boring and standard. 

It is clear I will not be using this website as influence to what I would like my site to look like, instead I’m using it as a site of which I can look at to remind me to not do anything like this. I will make sure my website has a catchy and understandable name so the viewers will be 100% clear on what the purpose of my site is. 

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http://5safepoints.com/

This is the homepage.

This website is clearly too crowded with different sized fonts, colours and images. The chaotic qualities of this site makes it very difficult for us to understand it’s purpose. It took my a while to figure out that it was a driving school because of the endless information and navigators. On this website there’s an image moving from one side to the screen to the other, this is great for grabbing the viewers attention to the moving image but as doing so the attention is detracted from the rest of the site, partly because the moving image covers some of the information up as it moves across and also because when something is moving but everything else is stationary our eyes will automatically keep looking towards the moving element. 

I do like the idea of using movement to grab attention as I think it works extremely well although I wouldn't let it detract from any other parts of my site and I wouldn't allow the movement to become annoying.

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http://www.vogue.co.uk/

This is the homepage for the Vogue website.

The layout of this website is in the style of a magazine, for me it’s too crowded and hard to understand but for regular magazine readers it would probably be much easier. I really like this about the website because the design relates to the product. Another thing I like is how the navigation buttons don’t move down the page when the rest of the content does when we use the scroll bar, this makes each page easy to access at any time we want, we don’t have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page just to use them.