Elements Collages
I found creating an elements collage to be a great way to experiment with multiple approaches to designing my portfolio mock-ups last year. Dan Mall came up with the concept of element collages following the release of Samantha Warren’s Style Tyles. While I really like style tyles as an approach to exploring various visual outcomes for a website I find element collages to be a little more freeing in that multiple approaches can be explored side by side at an elemental level.
Above is my previous elements collage that I created for my original portfolio website. It was interesting to see what portions I could carry over from the above and add to my new elements collage. In my new elements collage, I no longer felt I needed to explore the colour palette as in-depth as shown above as I planned to maintain the original colour palette. I found the inclusion of header sizes and font differences to not be as helpful as I had hoped. What I needed was to display the headers in context to get a clear idea of how this would fit visually on the website. Viewing a variety of hero sections, button options and case study menus were al very helpful and these are elements I have explored further in my updated elements collage.
Above is my updated elements collage. In this outcome, I have focused more heavily on responsive design. I have included new case study images produced for the website and considered how these could be arranged on desktop, tablet and mobile. I also looked at potential hover effects and slightly different arrangement options for desktops. I like the idea of separating sections by the inclusion of boxes and I have explored various structures and background colour options. Rather than focusing on size, font and weight choice I have created an overview of typography choices for headings and body text. I felt my typography selection was not strong enough in my previous design and this is something I wanted to rectify in my updated version. I plan to explore this further. I found this exercise really helpful as I was able to explore multiple variations to my design approach really quickly and view them side by side helping me to choose.