This project was one of my favorites so far I have to say. Although that’s not to say it wasn’t without its challenges and design problems, however completing this project for an immersive website based around the Apollo 11 space progam enabled me to grow as a designer and also improve my experience using Webflow as well. Overall I am pleased with the outcome of my site.
As I said, the brief for this project was based around the Apollo 11 space program. At first, I was slightly unsure about how I was going to approach this topic with a unique spin. But limitations breeds creativity , and so being limited in the design choices I had was actually beneficial for this project.
Some of the ways I purposefully limited myself in this project was by sticking as close as possible to the design brief – as in I stuck to the same pages that were laid out such as the cast and crew section, a section on data, and a silver screen section. I also stuck closely to the copy that was contained in the design brief – describing the narrative of the Apollo 11 mission. Sticking close to this design brief was useful as it saved time having to look at other sources for information or copy, and it meant that I didn’t overdo the amount of work I had to do in my site. I had a few sections on my site and so I did my best making those sections as good as possible.
I also limited myself when it came to the colour scheme – only using black and white imagery and splashes of red as highlights. This made my site look more consistent and the design more uniform. It also fits with the space theme – as space imagery is all about the colour black. Using white space in my site, or in this case ‘black space’ made the site more clean and less cluttered.
When creating this project I wanted to focus on the animations and I spent a lot of time working to perfect this. I hadn’t really created animations in Webflow before and so using online tutorials and Youtube videos to explain how to go about doing this step by step was quite enjoyable and satisfying. And so I experimented with different types of animation such as Lottie animations, parallax animations, and hover states. It was tricky to do, and there was a lot of failed attempts until I managed to get all of them working successfully and achieve a final outcome I was satisfied with.
The navigation was another aspect that I felt was important to get right as the title of this module was ‘Narrative and Storytelling’. Making my site a single page site where the user has to scroll down through all the individual sections, helped make the site more of a singular experience and journey. However, I feel like the actual ‘narrative’ aspect of my site is lacking in some ways. I could have spent more time structuring the content to make it more like a story. Perhaps changing the text copy itself so that it flowed with a beginning, middle and end would have been better. Because it currently reads more like an encyclopedia entry.
Looking back on this project, I wondered what I would have done differently if I were to do it again. One thing that I would have liked to do is even more animations. As of now, I have a few animations on my site that work well. But there also some static images on my site. I could have turned these static images into animations with more time to make the site even more engaging and interactive to use.
Something else I would have also liked to create would be interactive data graphs. As of now, I have just a slider wrapper on my site which works fine, however creating some pie charts or bar charts that the user can interact would have been good also.
Overall, this project was an enjoyable one to work on. This was one of the last modules of this year and a positive experience. In the future, I hope to improve my Webflow experience and create even better interactive sites with animation.