Web Design
Web Design was never really something I ever imagined myself being drawn to. As someone with a major and minor revolving around technology, I use websites on a daily, basically hourly basis, but they were never anything more than a tool for me. This all changed with my first internship in 2019. While being very inexperienced in the field of Graphic Design in general, I was tasked in my internship with creating a website that was to be used by the entire worldwide company of around 10,000 people. While this seemed like a daunting and impossible task for someone who had just learned the basics of HTML, it became the seed that grew my passion in this field.
Creating this website was an experience I will never forget. Coming into my first internship in 2019, I was lacking in a lot of areas. Because of this, I was left with no other option but to teach myself and learn from my mentors guidance. On top of my other tasks as an intern, I was mainly tasked with building an interactive website that allows users to interface and easily access most of the website from any page using WordPress and the WordPress plugin Thrive Architect. This site showcased resource development and innovation from a 30+ page brochure of internal company information in seven weeks after learning the Thrive Architect plugin in a week through tutorial videos and practice. While this experience originally seemed like a daunting and terrifying task, it ended up being something that greatly improved my skills as a graphic designer and introduced me to a field that I find true passion in. Unfortunately, due the nature of information, and the fact that Celgene was bought out shortly after I left, the only part of my website I’m able to show is the home screen.
This website was created by my two partners, Raven and Shannon, and myself for our final in Web Design III. This website was designed through a long and arduous process from content/user research to creating the InVision prototype. Because this was the final Web Design course and most of the students weren’t proficient coders, we as students were tasked again to forgo the HTML and CSS coding and focus solely on understanding the process of designing a website. Also, unlike the previous site (below), we created our web pages through InDesign. This difference is important because it let us as designers focus on the exact layouts of the pages while leaving us the ability to link parts around through InVision later. This process helped us understand what attracted users and what pushed them away and how to display information in a clean manor that enables the user to navigate through site with ease. Click here if you would like to try the InVision prototype.
This site was also created during my final Web Design course. While previously we had only designed sites in HTML and CSS, for the first time we were asked to build a site through InVision Studio and avoid the time consuming act of coding. The purpose of this was so that the designer could focus solely on the designing aspect of the site and learn how to truly design a website for a user. This wasn’t a new concept to me, but as it was my first time InVision Studio, I found myself leaning towards the careful a design. This is not a work that I’m particularly proud of, but it was yet another starting point in learning the field of Web Design. While I’m not proud of this work, this introduced me to InVision and apps like it that I have used many times since, so I felt I should include it. Click here if you would like to view the prototype.
Click here if you would like to view the process behind the design