Week 7: Design Talk

This week we Ronan in who is an experienced UX/Web designer who gave us a talk about what he does and hopes he got there. During this, he talked about the education path he went on and the work experience he did and how that affected where he is now. In the end, we got to ask questions about anything we found interesting such as what he thinks of certain types of design companies and what he would advise learning or looking into.

I found this very interesting as it’s always great to hear someone’s experience of what you’re going to go through and any tips he would give. He also talked about programs he would advise learning such as after-effects and blender/3ds but also how to pick what you like doing and what works well at the moment.

Website of the week:

Swirl gallery is a website dedicated to displaying and showing off NFT’s . The website shows off a lot of technical skill, with a lot of animations and moving parts. Not only does it look great but it’s very easy to navigate. On their homepage the blue enter button is well the first things you see along with the flavour text and the websites title. Whenever you move the cursor around the screen the images/NFT is move around in a parallax effect. Once you get to the main page you are met with a huge carousel of images that are lies you to search through the gallery.

I really like the consistent theme of white and blue throughout the website not only does this help clean up the website but it allows you to identify buttons based on the colour. There is a nice motion on the images which is created through animation and whenever you have over them the cursor changes to a plus symbol indicating that you can get more information which is great for user experience. The only downside to all of this is it can create a Laggy experience with a huge strain on the browser that can somewhat detract from the experience.

When you click on an image you get brought to a page where you can view the NFT at a larger scale from there you can navigate to see more about the artist. This page is slightly offputting due to the fact that it is a horizontally scrawling page as opposed to a vertically scoring page. However, once you get used to this it’s a very cool feature that allows you to layout the text very clean way and then displays images further over to the right. They have cleverly made sure that the user is aware that they can scroll to the right by using a custom scroll bar along with arrows and making sure that there is information that just peeps across the border of the website.

 

I would love to steal this page, in my opinion, the colours are great it uses simplistic phone which works well with the general same as page images are well created alongside a great set of buttons and an easy navigate able page makes a great the only downside is the strain that places on the computer and the somewhat bright effect which can put a slight strain on the eyes however this would be easily fixed if there was a dark mode or possibly just slightly darker colours.