Design Evaluation Assignment

For your consideration: a site that I feel is too cluttered with no real contrast or ability to attract your attention. Maybe the entire world financial crisis really started here. They just needed better web design!

Based on a design that lacks focus and tries to throw everything at you at once, it seems that Citi is trying to recruit every known human being to get some sort of card from them. Not a bad goal, but if you focus on everyone, you tend to captivate no one.

Also, the page lacks negative space and has very little white space. The vectors are all basically horizontal. Colors aren't bad, but also don't really pop out at the viewer. It all fades to a kind of pale blue. All in all, the page hearkens back to earlier days of the internet where the goal was to just get a lot of information out on the web, no matter how cluttered it looked.

Here's a site with what I feel is a better page layout.



There is much more negative space, allowing the eye to focus on the important parts of the ad. The asymmetrical balance of the picture of the car allows for a compensating balance of the copy on the left of the page. The vectors of the wall and the car also bring the eye to the copy. But probably my favorite part of the ad concept is the interactivity of the ad. It allows the viewer to design a route to anywhere in the world and test drive it inside the vehicle - a virtual test drive, if you will.

Finally, I leave you with a fun demonstration of what happens if you over-design your packaging. Here's what would happen if you let Microsoft package an Apple product.

A Question of Balance

Looking at the Epson site http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/printers.do, I'd say it's a good example of asymmetrical balance. The rotating scenes depicting slice-of-life uses of Epson products are all on the right hand side of the page. The scene appears first, creating a bit of asymmetrical tension. Then the text appears on the left side of the screen, balancing out the picture.
I loved the pretty loaded site http://prettyloaded.com/. Because these animated scenarios are meant to run while a page is loading, I'm assuming they didn't want to risk being too far to one side of the screen or the other, so they are all very symmetrically balanced - right in the middle of the screen. Many of them are radially balanced, originating in the center and then spreading out from there.

Get the Glass

Here's a pretty fun little board game on the net: http://www.gettheglass.com/.
The artwork is amazing, the sound is great, the challenges are . . . challenging. The site is sponsored by the California Milk Processor Board, and it's quickly obvious that there is the underlying agenda to get players racking their brains to come up with all the reasons why it's vital to drink enough milk. It would be much more fun if they brought up the latest studies that showed that humans aren't genetically built to absorb lactose from milk past about age two, and those throughout the world who aren't naturally lactose intolerant have inherited a genetic mutation called "lactose persistence." And even then, the idea of ingesting another mammal's lactose secretions is . . ., well, I guess I'll get off my soap, er, milk box. Long live rice milk.
It's also a little disturbing that the protagonists we are charged with helping are criminals, and the dastardly enemies we are running from are law enforcement authorities. But that's another blog.