In my last post, I discussed finding sources of inspiration. That challenge becomes a lot easier if you have specific guidelines set for you to begin with, such as a class assignment. In this post, I will talk about one of the assignments I worked on when working towards my Digital Media degree.
Here is my final project from my sophomore semester in which we were tasked with redesigning the website for a well-known company. We had the options of Coca Cola, American Airlines, or Nike. A majority of my class went with either Coke or Nike, so I decided to pick American Airlines. In my opinion, when I chose American Airlines, some of the design choices were already selected for me. For starters, when looking at the color scheme, it was already chosen to work with red, white, and blue. Second, I knew what the mission of their website was to sell travel tickets. This made it easy to decide what content should be available on the front page, here is their current website.
Although I am proud of this assignment, I also understand that it does not look the best. The main reason for this is I wanted to create as much of the content from scratch as possible. For am an inexperienced student, this leads to spending a majority of the time figuring out what tools I need to create what I want. For this project, I used Adobe Illustrator. The only things I did not create for this was the plane, the large image in the background, and the small images of airports at the top. From this project, I had learned a lot about what not to due, such as creating everything from scratch for a prototype when there are creative commons resources available for this purpose.
I’d highly encourage you all to try redesigning a companies website. You do not necessarily have to use software such as Illustrator to create it but use it as a source of both practice and also a way to find out if you enjoy this line of work. I hope you enjoyed me sharing some of my class experiences, please let me know if you’d like to hear more.
TBWTLITT 