Webessay research and design

For web essay I decided to do Aaron Draplin as when I was briefly looking through the list of options when I saw Draplin’s work I instantly knew I wanted to write about him, as I loved how his work was bright, fun, and colourful. When researching I went through several articles however many were stated the same things over, so I only choice to use the ones I found had the most interesting information. For one bit of research, I found myself listening to a podcast from thefutur, as this was the most useful bit of research as I could hear, how Draplin approaches his work and I got to know information that wouldn’t be something that you could find in articles. And this podcast really put in perspective into what kind of person Aaron Draplin is. Furthermore, this article helped me come up with a question for my web essay. Originally I had done research like I normal would do, which is copy and paste anything I wanted and go through it, I initially did this however, I started my 500 word on the same document and as I was writing I was taking the parts I needed from the copied parts, rewriting it to fit my essay then removing the copied information, so my essay contains much of my research but reword to how I wanted, hence I didn’t use many quotes however I did reference parts that I knew I reworded, despite being different form the original source. A part that was direct was quoted was bullet points as I didn’t want to reword these differently; however, this section isn’t quotation as the quotation marks would look odd, however it is in a block quote.

After writing my 500 words I began designing my website, and to do this I went to Draplin’s website as I wanted to have the site be instantly recognisable that its about him. From looking at his main site and his field notes site, I noted down things I noticed and liked before I started sketching. The first thing I sketched out was his site logo as I felt this way something I could easily design something to match that I could use on my navigation. After this I started designing the navigation bar, as there was something I wanted to try, which was the stripped pink, yellow and black bar, as there was an image of merch on his site and I liked the colour theme and wanted to try use it, however I need to compare it to a simple background to see if it would look ok with the logo. I then did two quick layout sketches as I liked that Draplin’s site layout had the 3 columns of content however my web essay was only one page whilst his was many different linked pages, so the columns may not work how I would like. The other option was laying it out, like how we were being taught which was one centred column, the benefit to this was that I could easily use the code I already knew; as with the three columns it involved much more code to make it work, that I would have to research and figure out myself.

The first few steps I did was, design the logo and go on figma and decide what navigation design works best, and I went with plain black as the strips would have made the navigation text hard to read. For my colours I wanted to try use I took the merch image I liked and put in on adobe colour to extract a colour theme to use for my site, the colour I wanted most to get was the orange as this is a colour that Draplin always uses, so it was important for me to use it. I initially just copied the code I had just to have the content I needed in and make the basic decisions on how it would look; however, I decided to do a mix of both sketch designs and have both the simple one column mixed with the three columns.