For my 2018 Christmas break, I knew I needed a personal project to keep myself occupied for the month that I would be at home. I decided to get an official website for myself up and running because I've heard that marketing yourself and sharing your work is a huge part of any creative industry, so the sooner the better. Luckily, I had just completed a course in user interface and user experience design, so I was able to directly apply many things I learned from that course.
A huge part of designing user interfaces is realizing that it is communication. The user is communicating with a computer to get something done. When communication is difficult or tedious, it's not a good experience. Working with anything that's badly designed is annoying and most of us don't have the patience or attention span for it. We expect things to run fluidly. For designing websites or apps, communication should be crystal clear. To accomplish this, I needed to know exactly what I needed my website to do. Right now, it is functioning as a place to showcase my photography and graphic design work and the blog is a way for me to not corner myself into just talking about photography or design all the time. I have other hobbies, so the blog gives me the space to talk about other interests if I want to.
Since I knew that I wanted my creative work to be the main part of my blog, I didn't want to go slinging colors and animations everywhere that would take away from my work. I'm a big fan of minimalist design and "less is more". For example, the home page of my website showcases some of my most recent work, the different pages you can look at, and my most recent blog posts. When you click on those headers, a viewer should know exactly what they are going to go look at.
Everything on my site has a job to do, and it should be pretty self-explanatory. Clicking on the photography tab transitions to that home page and from there, you can easily see which types of photography I do. Opening up one of those headings takes a viewer to the page where I exclusively show that kind of photography. The focus is on the work, so those pages contain hardly anything except the images themselves and maybe the title of a series.
The layout of the graphic design element of my website has a different style. At the time I was creating the site, I had just completed my first semester of graphic design classes. I didn't have enough completed work to divide my projects into categories, so I've kept it simple. What you see on the Graphic Design tab on the site is thumbnails of all my work, and users can click on the thumbnail and be directed to a new page to see the work in greater detail. The new page will also show all parts of the work if it is more than one piece. Right now, I'm almost completed with a couple of projects so I will be able to update this page with new work very soon!
The blog segment of my website was kind of an afterthought, but I'm glad that I started it. The system for making and publishing posts is very user-friendly so I can plan out posts weeks in advance if I want to. It was just a setting to attach to my website, so the grid design was completely automated, but I like the way it looks. I have also divided the blog into multiple categories depending on what I want to write about. I do have a loose schedule of what content I write about when, it goes Lifestyle, Photography, and then Graphic Design. I can also sort posts into overlapping categories, for example, my monthly update posts will appear under both the Graphic Design and Photography tabs. I do have Food as a category up there as well, but while I'm at school I am not able to produce that sort of content to the standard that I would like. When I'm home on breaks or during the summer, I will add Food posts into the mix!
I'd love to hear feedback about my website and what I could do to improve. Every once in a while, someone in real life will tell me that they read the blog and love it, and that makes me so happy! My whole purpose for it is to showcase photography and graphic design because it is such a huge part of my life, and the blog attached to that is to share a little bit more of my life with my readers. I sincerely appreciate anyone who is on the journey with me!
Thanks for reading!
xx, Hannah
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