My boss returns and we met up in the weekend at a cafe near the workplace to review on the site mockups. We also managed to speak with some people from the cafe about the site, if the site is easily understandable, and suggestions on what better can be done with them. Most of the people we had reviewing the site since the site was great, simple, and user-friendly. Others, however, said that the site was confusing based on the landing page wondering what this was. After we showed them the other mockups and discuss about them, it was then that they figured out that this was for a movie. Other mention some have said about the landing page was the “Join Now” bar where it should say “Subscription” instead, removing the title in the header bar since the title is already on the picture, and get rid of the black bar and place the “Subscription” bar below the car. Thanks to this information from the people, me and my boss discussed on how we should design the landing page and do a complete do-over of the page. After doing so, we both looked at each other and realized the landing page mockup was better then we thought.

After our meeting, my boss send me an email of the copy for the site to add to the mockups so I can get rid of the dummy text and replace it with the copy. I will be meeting up with him next weekend so I have to get this finished as soon as possible.

This week, I have been busy working on the website mockups for the site. After the great feedback I had last week, I decided to give it a notch and make the site look much better as it was before. Also, I was given a couple of rules from my boss to keep the style of the site mockups the same but change the colors for the navigation and description box so it looks richer and deep in color. This was the same with legibility and constant sizes for the header and text. Again, I jot down all the information he told me to work on so I would not forget this when I finish this up at home.

My boss went out of the country after our meeting so he can meet and discuss with the director in regards to how the movie was going. This was a perfect chance for me to continue working on the mockups and take my time to ensure it looks great, organized, and legible. Also, he told me in our next meeting he will give me the copy for each page so I can remove the dummy text and put the actual content on the page.

11/19/2013

Today I began work on the Fifth Harmony photo shoot file. I separated the images from group photo shoot to single photo shoot. It was a lot of images. I had to separate one by one. Each folder contained single photos mixed with group photos. It was fun to see the raw images instead of retouch image. They are real images without any Photoshop effect.  I also worked on the raw images to convert in Jpeg. I didn’t know that I could quickly open group of images in Photoshop and convert it to jpegs. So that was something I learned new. I did not have that much work to do and I started working on my school project.

I love the culture of Sony. When I was absent last week, my supervisor notified every department that I would be absent for some reason. When I came back the following day, they would talk about it and asked if everything was ok.  So this was the part I kind of hated but also loved it because it showed that they care about me. It was truly amazing to work in this kind of environment where you did not have to scare of anything and people behave like a human not a machine.  I don’t know when I will quite my old retail job but I am sure I cannot continue my old job anymore.

Same old stuff this week – still working with SMI and Ressler. This week I designed another email blast for Ressler Importers. This one was for a very high end chair of theirs. I usually do a couple of designs for them, then see which design they prefer. It can sometimes be difficult to do.

Their style is more formal, older, almost elegant. If I do an email design for them, it typically takes me 3 hours, sometimes longer if I need to make any edits or come up with a completely new design. My typical process is to read the email that they want to send and get the general idea of what they’re trying to sell that week/what they’re trying to promote/etc and get a feel for whatever idea they’re trying to get across to people. They will tell me what chairs they want to use in the email (in case the all item numbers are not listed specifically) and I’ll usually have to first correct the chair color, and make general adjustments to the chair. Then, I’ll look online for inspiration. If they are specifically trying to get across the ‘high end’ style, I’ll look at companies online like Restoration Hardware, maybe Design within Reach, sometimes they’ll promote chairs that are more modern, in which case I’ll look at CB2, maybe Eames online, etc. And other times it’s hard to find inspiration for what they’re selling.

I find that my style is a lot more modern than what they’re looking for – so I do have to curb this to suite their needs. But from time to time I just can’t help it – I push the modern look, they push back wanting to go back to their more detailed, elegant, older look. Geesh, sometimes it’s so hard to conform. 🙂

SMI has been a bit more work lately. I’m trying to fit it all in, but honestly, it’s been a little difficult. The new website redesign was close to being finished last week, but they mentioned they then wanted a new navigation as well as a few new pages. This new direction really put me back a few steps in terms of the project being complete. I had to quickly redo each layout in PS, then impliment this into HTML/CSS, and have my boss at SMI look over each, give me feed back, repeat.

This project has been a huge learning experience for me. I’ve completed a couple of paid freelance jobs prior to this one, and I’ve never had this exact problem before. I think the main problem was that because I had previously worked with this company, when they casually asked me to redesign a couple of the pages, I assumed it would be a nice, easy, low-key project – not too involved. Whereas I redesigned each page according to exactly what they wanted – I should have really taken the time to examine their entire site, review what was working, what wasn’t, and to talk to people about what they wanted the site to communicate. This I feel led to poor design on my behalf, and later- confusion and frustration as to what this company was really looking for in regards to their site.   Luckily, the site design has picked up a bit, but their are still some designs that I am very unhappy with. For example, on one of the pages, we recently have added a lot of text (really – a lot of text), we initially had much less text on this page, and the entire bottom half (literally, around 500px or so) was made up of a slider that had the many different data options they offered to clients. It made sense to me. Normally, I wouldn’t put a slider on the bottom of a page, but this version was so large, and had a real purpose, that I feel the page really flowed. We have now modified the page so that the slider is still at the bottom, but much, much smaller. They really want to keep the slider on the bottom of the page, which no longer makes sense to me. It feels like the slider is the attractive part of the page, the part that might get people to stay on the page. Anyway, I digress. The problems have come up here and there – but I really feel like overall it’s been a great opportunity and a wonderful learning experience for me. The next time I obtain a freelance position, I’ll be spending a bit more time initially coming up with a proposal – for the client and myself – in which I’ll spend some quality time going over everything the site needs before starting the actual work. Lesson learned. 🙂