What makes a good web design?

Not sure.......yet, but what i do know is what makes a not-so-good design. I think that any person with any hint of artistic ability can label certain components of a site to be "bad". Huge text, random colors, "boring", mismatching items, the list could go on forever. But what it all boils down to is one thing: Items that do not have any purpose in the design.

Like I said, anyone with a hint of artistic ability (like me) can match colors and create blocks of text and ultimately create a nice layout, but does the layout have a "why" to it? What's the importance of aligning text a certain way, why is item 1 this color, but item 2 that color? Why is this content divided the way it is? I've been interning now for a little over a month now and I realize how much of an amateur I really am......a horribly, designed-challenged amateur.

But recently, an unexpected source helped put it into perspective. It was actually a sales man who was having a talk with my boss. As my boss was talking the salesman would ask well why did you do that? Who is it for? Who's gonna use it? Who's your target? And I think these points describe exactly what a web designer should be thinking, along with how do I make this eye apealling and effective. And once you answer all of those questions, everything in the design has a purpose and it's not just....there.

New job!

Well, I finally landed an internship! I'm currently working for Squish Designs, a website development company located here in Indy. The company itself is run by two people, George Roots, a Purdue graduate, and Nicki Laycoax, to which I still don't know where she came from....but that's okay!

I wasn't in the office for too long today, but I was immediately thrown into the fire, acquiring an entire dry-erase board's worth of task to complete. Challenging.....yes, but work would never be fun if there weren't any challenges.

This internship is just what I needed to get a taste of the design world...I'll do my best to keep it.

Finished Site Design

After some long thought and head scratching I finally finished this thing. I decided to stray away from the black just because it seem a little too extreme for what I wanted to do. I couldn't finish the cartoon of myself either, but I still put the sketch in there just to offset that massive amount of blank space.

Site Design

Trying to make a portfolio layout....it's a start....It's times like these when I realize how long it's actually been since I've worked in photoshop

Simplfied Me

Currently working on a design for my portfolio site. I always wanted a little character of myself in there somewhere, so I started this guy. If i had more time, I would have made a 3D character instead, but for now this will do. So far, just using Illustrator

Watch 'em stretch

Just finished the main rig for my little afro character. With this, I can manually adjust the squash and stretch on him without too much wackiness as a result. I used two bones, and a lot of dummy objects to make this. The top circle controls stretching from the top of course, likewise with the bottom, and the center controls the main body movement as well as having the center point for rotation. Give me few more days and I'll have the morphers up and running :).

*click* *click*...

Been working on this Desert Eagle model for a couple days now. Currently modeling it in separate parts so that I can animate it correctly. I still need to do a lot of minor tweaking, as well as adding in the safety switch, the clip release, and the sights.