Panther8’s Blog

Today we learnt how to use the pen tool, brush tool, work with vectors, bit maps and selecting colours. We ended by doing a quirky heart exercise.

The website I have chosen to critique is www.flybe.com. It is a website for booking cheap flights to various destinations. Overall I found the design of the homepage to be cluttered, fussy and distracting from the main purpose of the site .i.e. to quickly book a cheap flight. 

While the basic layout was clear consisting of four coloumns of information, with the main site navigation placed on the left hand side and key information placed in the header and footer, the content placed within those core areas was too diversified in colour, typography, shape and design. There was a sense of information overload with too many advertisements for different services, moving images and price deals filling up the screen. The process of booking a flight can be stressful enough without the added distraction of too much information being posted at you, in strong colours of red and blue.

Also the large colour images in the central column meant the page took a while to download. In conclusion I felt this website could be vastly improved by simplifying the design, putting in less adds, no distracting moving images and focusing more on the mind set and needs of the user. Also it’s logo was completely forgettable.

Today we learnt about hue and saturation. We followed this with an exercise on adjustment layers using Gerry Ryan’s face as a basis. It was a lot to take in for a complete novice and so the following exercise on creating a negative image of Amy Winehouse went really abismally 😦 I know what I will be doing during my Easrer Holidays – studying my notes….)