iArts Design Commentary

My iArts Design

I wanted to give the iArts website a more pop-art, 50's type of a look, perhaps inspired by the tomato soup can poster from one of the shows. I started with the general design of my Mark Rothko and utilized the color scheme I had developed there. The brown and torquoise together remind me of that decade.

My initial plan was to create a Flash ticker of thumbnails from the latest show. In previous versions of Flash, there was a Flash component that did this (I tested it while working at Macromedia), but it is no longer there, and I was having trouble developing one on my own. Because of time constraints, I gave up on that and instead created the movie that's currently there. I really like the font in the Flash movie -- I think it matches the colors and feel of the site. If you look closely, you'll notice that the browns don't exactly match, even though I used the exact same HTML color number in Paint Shop Pro, Flash and HMTL. The eye candy on the front page which then becomes the logo on subsequent pages is a piece of clip art I pulled from Microsoft online. I changed its colors to match my color scheme. I really wanted to stick with my four main colors to increase the impact.

The next step is to go to the Gallery page, which has plain text links to the albums. Again, this is in keeping with the theme of simplicity and consistency. Clicking on one of the links to a year's show takes the user to that show's index of thumbnails. I chose to do four across. Clicking on one of the thumbnails takes the user to a larger version of the thumbnail. I have added "Previous" and "Next" links to page through the larger pictures. I wanted to add a "Back to iArt 2005" link but couldn't find the right place for it.

I think the color scheme, while interesting and vibrant, is neutral enough to set off the art well.