Design Strategies

There were a couple of ideas of how to go about this project.

The poker theme had been used once in an earlier project, but that project was very plain and simple. With this project, I would be able to make the design more creative. The five cards at the top of the screen have been part of the design in my mind since day one. I wanted to add the suit symbols to each of the headings. The project needed to have the two different suit colors, red and black. Although the black clearly dominates the red, the use of the two different colors is easy to notice.

The original idea for the links was to not do anything fancy to them. However, after doing a little bit of searching, I found a link design that I liked. The borders under the headings are a good way of keeping the heading separate from the text. The border below the "suggestions" text is actually the club suit lined up next to each other. The only suit symbol I did not use was the diamond. I would have liked to include it, but it was not a big necessity. The diamond does show up in the aces background. This was a last minute part of the design. The ace of spades along the side of the design was also a last minute design. The body and requirements headings use the Helvetica font. The requirements text uses the Georgia font. The sidebar uses the Arial font.

Working Process

The idea for the five cards at the top of the page was to cut out the background and just show the five cards. This was done using the magic wand tool in Fireworks. It was relatively easy thanks to the simple design. The suit symbols for the headings were also done quite simply. A picture was found that had every suit in it. I simply cropped the photo to include only the suit symbol. Then the image was scaled down to the size of slightly bigger than the text. The link design in the sidebar was borrowed from another source. Having the text and background change color when the mouse hovers over the link is not too fancy, but better than doing nothing at all. The design was originally going to have a white background. However, I felt that it needed to be some other color. Black was an alternate choice to white. However, the spades would not show up and would therefore need to be changed. I wanted to keep the original colors of the suit symbols. Instead, a picture was found, and I brightened the picture so that text could be seen on top of it.

The font of the footer was also made bigger. It bothers me when I have to squint to read text so I try to make the font as big as I can, but still small enough for the designated section. I originally had the text pushed up against the left side of the screen. This was changed so that there was some space between the edge of the screen, and the text. However, this still did not look good. Eventually, I added the ace of spades repeating all the way down the side of the screen. For this picture, I could not find one single ace of spades card. I ended up using the same picture where I got the suit symbols. I cropped the picture to only include the ace of spades. However, in the picture the ace of spades was tilted slightly. I used Fireworks to turn the image so that it appears to be at a straight angle. The design originally had Times New Roman fonts for every section except the sidebar which had Arial. This was too boring so I tried out a few different fonts. I wanted to use fonts that were different from the standard, but not too crazy. I had a poker theme to follow, but there is no set font for poker.

Credits

I found the picture of the five cards at Free Stock Photography. At stock.xchange I found the following images:

The link design was found at Maxdesign. The code was borrowed from Professor Lowe's CSS Design. The format of the site is the same basic format as Professor Lowe's. This format is straight forward and felt there was no need to mess with a good thing. The project went through many trial and errors to get everything aligned and looking the way it should. I enjoyed this project. Although there was a lot of trial and error, it was fun once I eventually figured out how to do everything. I'm happy with the way everything turned out.