UI/UX

 UI Design: focuses on the look and feel of a digital product and how the interface looks, including buttons, typography, colors, spacing, icons, ect. It's essentially the visual design and interactive elements users interact with.

UX Design: is about the overall experience a user has when interacting with a product or site. It involves user research, usability, information architecture, and how intuitive or satisfying the experience is. UX is about solving problems and making sure the user's journey is smooth and effective.

Underlined is basic summary :)

List of 10:

Design for Mobile First (or at least keep it well in mind)

• Ensure your website is responsive and works well on all screen sizes- mobile traffic often exceeds desktop.

Keep Navigation Simple and Intuitive

• Use clear menus and logical structure so users can easily find what they need in just a few clicks.

Use Clear Calls-to-Action

• Buttons and links should be easy to see and tell users exactly what will happen when clicked ( (“Get a Quote,” “Sign Up”).

Optimize Page Load Speed

• A fast site improves user satisfaction and lowers bounce rates. Compress images and eliminate unnecessary scripts.

Prioritize Accessibility

• Make sure your content can be accessed by all users, including those using screen readers or other assistive technologies. Remember ALT commands on images!

Maintain Visual Consistency

• Use consistent colors, fonts, and design elements to build trust and brand recognition.

Use Whitespace Effectively

• Don’t overcrowd the page- good spacing improves readability and highlights important elements.

Make Content Easy to Scan

• Break text into headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs. Most users skim before deciding to read. Avoid a million images.

Test with Real Users

• Conduct usability testing to find out where users struggle and improve based on real feedback.

Minimize User Effort

• Fewer clicks, faster access to info, and easier forms all contribute to a smoother experience—remove unnecessary steps wherever possible.

SEO Post

 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-

Refers to the process of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages like Google. The goal is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to a website by making it more accessible and relevant to search engines and users.

List of 10-

1. Submit a Sitemap to Search Engines: Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines (like Google) to ensure they know the structure of your site and can crawl it effectively.
2. Add alt text: After recently going over this in class, its good to give your images titles, and alt text, incase images cannot load, or to ensure all (visually impaired or blind) can also take in your data and content.
3. Optimize Your Site’s Load Speed: Fast-loading pages are crucial for user experience and are favored by search engines. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test and improve load times.
4. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly: With mobile-first indexing, search engines prioritize mobile-optimized websites. Use responsive design to ensure your site works well on all devices.
5. Use Clean, SEO-Friendly URLs: Ensure URLs are descriptive, concise, and include relevant keywords. Avoid using long strings of numbers or irrelevant characters.
6. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These elements are important for SEO and help search engines understand the content of each page. Ensure they are clear, keyword-rich, and enticing for users.
7. Improve Internal Linking Structure: Internal links help search engines crawl and index your site more efficiently, as well as improve user navigation.
8. Use Header Tags (H1, H2, etc.) Correctly: Header tags help search engines understand the structure of your content. The H1 tag should describe the main topic of the page, while H2 and H3 tags break down sections.
9. Ensure Your Site is Secure (HTTPS): Search engines prefer secure websites. Implement SSL certificates to ensure your site is HTTPS encrypted, which is also a ranking factor.
10. Regularly Update and Optimize Content: Keep content fresh and relevant. Search engines tend to favor websites with up-to-date and valuable information. This includes optimizing older blog posts or pages that may have lost relevance.

Creativity 3-

Engaging in collaborative creative exercises can significantly enhance one's imaginative capabilities. By partnering with others, individuals can explore diverse perspectives, challenge their assumptions, and co-create ideas that might not emerge in isolation.​ Recently, a friend and I embarked on a collaborative endeavor to conceptualize a paladin character for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. He uses this character in his current campaign with friends but never really thought about how they looks- so this started when I offered to draw.

​

While the drawing remains a work in progress, I focused on elements that allowed for greater artistic freedom, such as the helmet, pose, and sword. These aspects enabled me to infuse personal interpretation while staying true to our shared vision.

​

Collaboration I have seen on the "creative exercise" sites a handful of time but haven't had a chance to try it out so much- which is why I was happy to sit down with someone and shoot ideas out in a brainstorm session. DnD has a lot of creative elements, after all the whole purpose of the game is to create characters and roleplay as them, imagining the world and scenarios they'll get into. As stated, my friend uses the Paladin play style, armor is very difficult to draw as there is many blocky shapes and intricate designs- I went with a more Bloodborne based armor, with lots of wing based details and almost eldritch horror style. Id like to finish this project and make it more polished once I have time!

A few sites you can check out with collaborative ideas:

• https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/design-thinking-exercises/
  
• https://www.ideou.com/pages/collaboration
  

Design 3-

 Currently, I’m gathering inspiration and research for a web project centered around tourism in Maine, a state known for its rugged coastline, charming towns, and natural beauty. One of our projects required we put together some moodboards, font choices, and overall inspiration to reflect into the project, while doing so, it helped me expand my understanding and overall perspective to tackle making a cohesive and visually pleasing page.

A well-crafted website can not only share information but also evoke a feeling or experience. I’ve been exploring travel websites, image sharing websites, and minimalist layouts to understand how different elements come together to guide a visitor's eye and keep them engaged. But beyond visuals, good web design is deeply rooted in intention and usability. Whether the site promotes tourism in Maine or selling postage stamps, the goal is always the same: clear communication and a seamless user experience.

Here are five key elements that make a well-designed web page:

1. Strong Visual Hierarchy

A well-designed page organizes content so users naturally know where to look first. This is achieved through font size, color contrast, layout spacing, and placement of key elements like headings, images, and call-to-action buttons. A clear visual hierarchy makes the experience intuitive.

2. Responsive Design

Today’s audiences browse on all kinds of devices, from phones to widescreen monitors. A quality website must be responsive—adapting seamlessly to different screen sizes while keeping layout and content clean and accessible across several platforms.

3. Purposeful Typography

Fonts aren’t just for readability—they set the tone. Clean sans-serifs convey modernity, while serifs or script fonts might suggest elegance or tradition. Pairing two complementary fonts with clear hierarchy keeps things stylish and legible. Searching on free websites, or Adobe fonts can give you a whole world of different fonts, for this project I used keywords like, outdoors, earth, and woodsy.

4. Intuitive Navigation

Good navigation helps users find what they need without frustration. Whether it’s a sticky header, a collapsible mobile menu, or breadcrumb trails, clear navigation ensures a site feels easy to explore, not overwhelming. Keywords also help the site be found or for even the user/reader to navigate better, making different topics standout from one another.

5. Consistent Branding and Aesthetic

From color palette to photo style, every detail contributes to a brand’s identity. Consistency builds trust and polish. For a tourism site about Maine, this might mean a calming coastal palette, serif fonts that evoke heritage, and landscape photography that draws visitors in.

Copyright Importance-

 Why Copyright is Important to Designers: 4 Key Reasons

In the world of design, where originality and creativity are the foundation of success, copyright plays a critical role. It offers legal protection and professional security to creators, ensuring that their work is respected and valued. Here are four reasons why copyright is especially important to designers:

1. Protects Original Work
   Copyright grants designers legal ownership of their creations- whether it's a logo, layout, illustration, or product design. This protection ensures that others cannot legally copy, distribute, or profit from the work without permission.

2. Supports Fair Compensation
   When a design is copyrighted, it provides leverage for the designer to be properly paid for its use. This could be through licensing fees, royalties, or exclusive contracts, helping to ensure that creative professionals earn a fair income from their work.

3. Builds Professional Credibility
   Registering a copyright adds legitimacy to a designer’s portfolio. It communicates that the work is original, protected, and professionally handled- important for gaining client trust and maintaining a competitive edge.

4. Discourages Infringement and Misuse
   Knowing that a design is copyrighted acts as a deterrent for those who might otherwise steal or alter the work without consent. It empowers designers to take legal action if infringement occurs, reinforcing the value of creative ownership.

In short, copyright isn’t just a legal tool- it’s a form of respect for the time, skill, and vision that designers pour into their craft. It protects creativity and helps the design industry thrive with integrity.

Here are some sources to educate:

https://www.copyright.gov/engage/visual-artists/

https://penji.co/graphic-design-copyright/

https://www.hellobonsai.com/blog/design-copyright

Project 2a- Design Brief

 

Project Name: Project2a (Tourism Site)

Name of Client: Maine Office of Tourism

 

Project Requirements: 6 page website with graphics

 

Target Audience:

The target audience is for those potentially seeking out travel, the purpose of this is to entice people to come to Maine to spend money in tourism based locations. Potential audience may include: Those looking for scenic views, hikers, hunters, outdoor sports, winter sports, fishing, etc.

 

 

The Goal of the Project:

Goal is to have a clean and informitive website, that may help people decide to travel to Maine, the further goal is to get more people in the state funding programs with purchasing fishing/hunting licenses, and putting money into wildlife resources (hiking, parks, camping).

 

 

Intended Message:

Taking these actions to to inform and educate those who may not know all the travel and excursion opportunities located up north.

 

 

Types of Imagery:

Wild life, landscape, sports, action, and tranquility- including all these types of images to offer range and variety.

 

 

Color Choices:

Blue, green, brown, to keep with the wildlife theme.

 

 

Type Choices:

Possible choices:

• Baskerville2
• Fagun
• Chippewa Falls
• Quicksand

 

 

What is your call to action?

Link to start planning a trip;

showing bookings for local events

car rentals

or maybe flights

Moodboard:

Creativity Post- 2

Earlier this week while I was looking for some new creativity warm-ups, I stumbled across a fun little drawing exercise called Squiggle Birds. It's a simple and lighthearted way to get your mind and hand loosened up, especially if you're staring down a blank page or trying to get out of a creative rut!

 

The concept is super simple: you start with a random squiggle, literally just a quick, aimless doodle- and then you turn that shape into a bird. That’s it. No rules, no structure, just pure creativity. The idea is to free your mind from the “blank canvas” fear and let your imagination do the work. I used orange like the website did to separate the doodles from the actual birds, and changed the opacity underneath.

After a few tries, I wanted to change the subject matter, to just have some more fun with it — so I tried using the same squiggle-to-form technique, but this time to make fish instead of birds. It’s a similar process: start with a squiggle, mess with it, and then see what aquatic creature it could become. 

This kind of exercise is for anyone really it’s a simple way to get your ideas flowing, fill up a workspace, and to help change your perspective. If you’re curious, here’s a link to where I first found the exercise- LINK, the site has a handful of simple warmups and creativity exercises!

Design Post 2

 Earlier in the year while we were learning about printing and some manufacturing aspects of graphic design we went over a company called Pantone, which is a company that produces ink swatches and is host of one of the worlds only universally accepted string of recipes. Their main purpose is to ensure colors of ink and production remain consistent across the globe, for a company like Oreo (for the sake of example) can produce a package in Tennessee, USA or Tokyo, Japan and have no difference or change in the hues of their product. Earlier this week I found a video from Business Insider that went into detail about the company; Here's what I learned!

Monopoly

As stated above, Pantone is a very unique company, there are not many like it, because of this, Pantone has been able to surge prices and easily disregard any start-up company that tries to come near them. Pantone has the upper hand in terms of reliability, and now major industries will avoid printing companies if they don't use the system of codes that Pantone has produced. There have been a handful of companies before Pantone that functioned under a similar premise, but most were deemed obsolete by the masses or just couldn't keep up with Pantone's rise to the top. The company even goes as far as taking things to court to crush smaller brands, a company in 1968 named Para-tone felt the wrath of Pantone's legal team. Many designers feel they are pressured into spending hundreds into the brand.  

Not just paper

For the longest time I figured that Pantone only produced paper based products, their key sellers are usually these long, handheld flip books filled with swatches for quick reference and information. While watching the video they showcased a large variety of the products they sell. Their best-seller was the handheld swatch books I mentioned, but they also sell books, replacement swatches, merch like mugs and tumblers, computer software, and a revolving case that holds plastic swatches! Apparently the company recently started dabbling in coloring plastics, in the video they show some neat examples of the outcome!

Adobe Split

Before, Pantone had a deal with Adobe, which allowed designers to use their color codes quickly. However Pantone wanted more revenue for this and ended up ceasing their agreement with Adobe in October of 2022. Many designers were outraged, has the fee to now use Pantone colors in programs like Adobe ranged from $90-$400 a month! Later on Pantone decided to host it's own software, nut this hasn't won over many of their fans, stating its slow, outdated, and a hassle to use. The software plugin still only has a 1-star review, and now mostly acts as a landing page to further advertise their products.

Watch the video!

I recommend checking out the video! 

Design Post-1

 In the world of coffee giants, the two on top are without a doubt Dunkin' and Starbucks, both of these brands have secured quite a legacy raking in BILLIONS every year! Dunkin' has gone through a handful of logo changes, but primairly sport their name in a bright orange font, with well rounded edges, displaying playfulness and a sense of being loud, and this reflects in a lot of their advertising. At the complete oppisite end of the spectrum is Starbucks, who uses dark somber colors, like a hunter green, coffee brown, and black in most of their branding, which provides a calm vibe and tone to their market, a place where you can sit and work. 

 As someone that has worked as a Barista most their life, and now has a focus in graphic design, its intresting to find other alternitive coffee companies and see how their branding differs so much from their massive corporate counterparts- in recent years we've seen an influx in popularity with coffee companies and "huts". All have very different marketing, yet sell the same product, what separates them from each other.

In this blog I'll be covering the following logos:

• Caribou Coffee
• 7Brew
• Dutch Bro's

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Caribou Coffee

Caribou Coffee is a Global coffee company that strives to build customer experiences in their coffee houses, the brand is very well know for their fun and playful marketing- I personally recommend checking out their site layouts. The company also strongly pushes to leave a good impact in a eco friendly manner as well!

I wanted to use this image of their logo change, the original logo is quite literally a caribou! It's super cute, looks hand drawn, and just overall pushes that "homey" feel. This logo they used when they were a smaller company, but as they grew, now to 800 locations, they made a more sleek design- I absolutely adore this design, which was designed by Ed Bennett,  typically when companies start to rise and lose that personal touch, so does their logo, affected by the "minimalist plague" taking over rebrands, luckily Caribou Coffee did not suffer this. The logo is sleek, clean, has a unique usage of color, the black to brown is a nice reference to the color of coffee, and then turning the leaping caribou into a coffee bean! To keep the "homey" feel, it even includes script writing above (and more focused on) the plain coffee text.

7Brew

7Brew is a fairly new coffee shop, only just being introduced around 2017, the owners of this company are actually friends with the owners of Dutch Bro's, which is where the company started to build some of its key concepts, I found out in a recent interview with Christian Lovato, a hiring manager here in Tampa. The company states that the customer is paying for the experience rather than the coffee- here the brand strives to make personal connections with the customer, even going as far as taking mic's and headsets out of their equation, preferring the customer have their order taken face to face and being interacted with!

Because the company is so new, they don't sport any logo redesigns. Their current logo is fun, spunky, and works with desaturated colors to add a clean aspect to the design. This company prides themselves with their merchandise, often giving away loads of free stuff to wear to both customers and employees, pushing for an apparel market as well. I'm curious if later down the line the company will change up the logo for a more sleek design, or keep the spunky one instead.

Dutch Bro's

Dutch Bros is an older coffee company, one that started out in Oregon, and is now super popular in Texas. These coffee huts have stormed the coffee world with how many flavors, and variety they offer. Unfortunately they are not well expanded into the Florida market, but hopefully soon!

Dutch Bro's branding is an interesting mix of vintage styles and modern styles, with strong bold fonts to display their name, along with a graphic of a Dutch windmill, but also sports their "coffee" tagline in a swirly cursive font, that takes on a three tiered stripe of colors. The bottom half reminds me a lot of the Eggo logo for the waffles! 

Dutch Bro's mission, which 7Brew used for inspiration, is all about giving back to their customers and the community, even their website displays how loyal fans got them to where they are today! Since we are learning about website design this month, I recommend checking out their pages! They have a few intresting interactive elements, I thought was super different and definitely caught my eye.

Effective Website

First Site; Yoast

Yoast is a company that offers a variety of products and blogs that strive to help business owners have good websites that insight high traffic and sales- On this site they have many pages of free information and pointers that talk about creating an effective website, they even provide helpful videos!

Link!

Take aways:

• Have a clear mission/goal
• Sites should signify they are safe and secure for the user
• Good design/up to date
• Friendly usage for all devices

Second Site; Wix

Wix in itself is a website building platform- they offer templates and features easy to use for people less tech savvy, other than that they often provide blogs helping people build their site. You can find their tips and tricks on their sub-page WixBlogs.

Link!

Take aways:

• Simple site Navigation
• Cohesive Branding
• Credibility/Security
• Clear Intent/Purpose

Third Site; Forbes

Forbes is a very well known media company that has many, many articles. Known mostly for their magazine and online content, you can find many helpful things- like how to make an effective website, within their page.

Link!

Take aways:

• Focus on SEO (Search Engine)
• Make pages easy to navigate
• Create engaging content

Creativity Post 1

 Creativity Post 1-

This past week I had to work on a personal project for a friend that was in the hospital, a lot of this personal project involved physical crafts, which I wanted to write up about here on my blog. A lot of my work is done digitally, and I haven't done much cutting and pasting with paper outside of elementary school- so this was quite out of my comfort zone in creating.

Going on Pinterest is an amazing way to browse and gather ideas, you can take what you find and build off of them to create your own personalized gift or diy project, which is what I did in this. Because some of the details are personal I wont go super in depth of the contents of each one, but I will write about some of the things I learned!

Things I made;

2 Custom CD's

A handbound book, all pages custom

A fake postage box (mini) 

Some things I learned:

- Collaging

 I have never collaged before, not with physical magazines or digital content, so again I took to online and found what I could, for this project I mostly used digital collaging, using art programs like Ibis Paint and Autodesk to gather the sizes of my pages and arranging what pictures I found to fit, from here I would cut around, and work out what kinds of layouts I would want on each page, from there I would glue, staple, or even paperclip- as I wanted the book to warp from 3D elements from inside. Below I'll attach some of the pages I made to cut out.

- How to bind a book

 Much like collaging, I've never hand binded a book, unless using staples. After researching online, using ribbon and lacing the pages together looked much better and actually lets the book last much longer (can withstand more than staples). It's super simple to manage, using any tutorial online works, I'll attach one below.

Bind Tutorial!

- How to burn a CD

 This proved much more difficult than the last two, as burning CD's is becoming more and more of a lost technology, none of the devices I had couldn't even support a CD, since they had no port. Luckily my brother had a super ancient Dell laptop that still took CD's. From here we had to hurdle the computers lagginess, but other than that it was super simple, I just used a Spotify to MP3 converter to gather the songs I wanted and transferred them to the older computer in a Zip file. From here we just accessed the Media Player app and the option to burn was available, of course the computer had a bit of a struggle but after QUITE the wait- we had 2 CD's with music!

- How to make a box

 This craft for some reason made me super proud, I found a cute craft where the person made a fake mini parcel, so I eyeballed how they had cut the cardboard and drew up a rough guideline on sketchbook paper (I recommend thicker stock or watercolor paper), cut it out, folded, glued, then reinforced it with painters tape, then BOOM! a little box, which i think would be fun for mockups. Below is a image of a rough sketch I made to make the box and the little makeshift box.

Article 2

 Now more familar with how InDesign worked I got more comfortable adding images and rearranging the layouts on some of my pages for the article, this series of works was required to be 4 pages long, and typically it takes me just about two pages to write a decent article, so I decided to take two prompts provided by my peers and to transition them into one another to build a fuller and more intresting article. The prompt I started with was "What is your favorite style of design" into "How does minimalism affect design".

After choosing what I wanted to write about I gathered up images and examples to use in both segments of writing, for the second half I wanted to use on example of good/bad to keep things evened out. Afterwards I took to writing, using a few pages like 1000Logos and from the Caterpillar site itself, to reinforce my article, then I cleaned it up and combed through it with Grammarly to make sure it had a level of professionalism to it. 

After finishing the article I opened up InDesign and messed with the layouts using as many images as possible that would reference back to what was being talked about in the written portion. Then I decided I wanted to make a visual for the article, about one page- so using Adobe Illustrator, I mocked up a simple design, using some of the Keiser blues as corner holders- and then posing a CAT excavator above the "bad examples" to make a fun playful visual. After making this in Illustrator I had gotten a fun idea from one of the default layouts our teacher provided us, there was a thin strip on the side of the written portion which I thought would look nice with the covers of the old Field and Stream art I had referenced- so after getting the dimensions with the ruler tool, I went back into Illustrator and whipped up a simple design. 

Below are the spreads I had made after finished.

Something I would have changed would be swapping the full page visual with the page next to it, to counter balance the placements of the two pages of text.

 

Article 1- Getting Into Graphic Design

 This article was my first time fully interacting with Adobe InDesign, most of the tools are easy to navigate as they replicate ones found in other Adobe software- however I did get tripped up with some of the unique features, such as the text warps and pasteboards, but doing a little additional research they're simple to understand. 

Before going into InDesign I wrote up a draft in Word, put it through Grammarly, and then asked an AI software (Chat GPT) on tips to make it sound more professional/meant to be in a magazine- after using some of its advice I rewrote the original draft, and then added "segments" to different parts of the writing to help separate topics. While messing with the images and text warp, I had a few issues, one of which I discovered was a default setting regarding resolution- making the images look beyond blurry.

Then using help from some of the mockups provided, and some inspiration from Article layouts found online, I added in my writing, fixed the fonts to match, and added in some of my artwork and a texture at the end of the last page. Then I went over it a few times, re-adjusted some photos and added a small photo of myself along with my work.