I had an enjoyable time working with GDC, and with Sophie in my first group project in the IDEA Program. I find that I usually work well under design systems, and following them correctly, which ended up taking a slight toll on the visual design process for this project. I believe I was too caught up in continuing GDC’s current brand into the new website design, which was partly the problem in the original design.
I appreciated getting honest and constructive feedback from my peers, with the suggestion of a separate colour pallet for the student page. The thought of adding more colours had honestly never come up during my ideation process, even though I was aware of the feedback from the survey and my peers on the current site were the bright, aggressive red. Changing the banner colours changed the vibe of the website so much (much love for our class!!).
For the rationale of the decisions Sophie and I made for the revamped student landing page, a big part was making GDC’s visual look and tone of voice friendlier. This meant introducing the light blue and yellow into the colour scheme, adding illustration banners and iconography, including testimonials, and making the overall information much more digestible
Students are often impatient and when faced with a long long page with just 12pt text, we often decide to leave the page or to skim along, potentially missing key information. Iconography really helped to visually represent the information, while giving users a break from all the text in the page.
I would give Sophie and I a 9/10 for this assignment, as I believe if we were able to take more “risks” to make the website different earlier on during the design process, our execution could have been even stronger than what we had during presentation day. I believe our presentation went smooth on the day of, our prototype worked correctly with no errors (yay!), we executed the project to our expectations, and Sophie did a fantastic job with the illustrations! I believe this project gave me a good feel into presenting to clients, and enjoyed the whole process working with GDC.
Moodboard: https://invis.io/TYRJDNF7ABN
Site Prototype: https://invis.io/TYRJDNF7ABN