Certain sections are much more important than others with this site, and depending on why you are here, you will have different interests and want to see specific relevent and pertinent data to your needs. On the whole, most people are here to look at my portfolio and the things that I do – and so communicating this is my most important responsibiliy. As the portfolio itself has so many varied categories, it would be best to show on the front page only the most interesting and largest  sections – such as web and graphics – so that people have a quick access point to what they want.To get to the heart of how I want to promote the content, it is important to understand what people want to look at – and how that affects their next move around the site.

Certain sections are obviously essential – such as Contact and About – these communicate rudimentary information that has to be available site wide. For contact we have the choice of showing a contact page, or even just contact details in the footer. Same with About -it would be best to show some about information all the time – prefereably with a link to more information, best served with it’s own page.

Main Colour Palette

The soft brown makes for an extremely easy on the eye text colour, and the blues lend themselves to links with hover classes.

The interesting thing is going to be where to use the accent greens and how to display the extra blue so that it ties the style together. This palette is quite bold, and without making the entire site dark, I have decided to partition the colours into sections with only one colour repeating everywhere.

What is nice about this colour scheme is that there are alternative combinations of colours that can be used that complement each other but look radically different when used side by side with other combinations. Take for example green and brown next to green and navy – these contrast very strongly and so could be useful to draw fences between sections.

These five colours will be used all over, but for backgrounds there needs to be some shades of neutral tone. White is an obvious choice, but as a lot of my art uses white as the highlight colour, the works will not be as vibrant if placed on sheer white. Thanks to new CSS specifications we can utilise opacity to help blend these tones together with the white content sections.

Also, as the site is already becoming overcrowded with navigation – most of which is secondary – we need a non distracting colour for hiding these away.

As promised, I am going to keep all my processes documented in this blog. The basic premise for the new site in my head is a strongly character based style with part animated, part static, all fun content! Starting out with a fresh sketch book and a head of ideas, I have already made some decisions way before starting anything about certain design restrictions that I am self imposing.

Firstly, I am designing for 960px screen width – that is 960 pixels maximum width – with a permanently visible section of 800px.

Secondly, for proportional prosperity, I will be using the classic 16 : 9 ratio for balancing whitespace.

Thirdly, and as ever, all guides, sections and margins are based on the golden section and Phi – this allows harmonious  subsections to fit anywhere on the site.

From these restrictions, it’s time to get the pen to paper