Veridis Quo: 05/21/13

After seeing a variety of good and bad website designs I have realised that planning is the key to a good website, without planning the website can go horridly wrong or simply look messy and unorganised compared to a professionally presented site. The goal for my website will be to make people more aware of factors associated with denim E.g the history of denim, the manipulations of denim and denim in the celebrity world. It will be an informative website giving people an outlook on denim aswell as featuring links to my blogs. My target audience will be literally anyone with access to the internet. There won't generally be an age limit, a particular race or genre more interested in the topic or any type of person who would be more likely to view it I think it is a general website for anyone. Maybe specifically people who are interested in fashion or the history of fashion and denim or even just photography. The type of content I need for my website would include a large variety of primary source photographs of denim and fashion. I have taken over 100 photos of denim and chosen around 50 of my favourite ones to include in the website.

Aswell as this I need to have information about denim and its history. For this information I took a book out of the library about denim. This was the book, it gave me lots of information about where denim originated from and how far Levis had gone with producing so many variations.

I decided to begin designing my website on Photoshop once I had the main ideas in place and all the information/imagery necessary. I first began designing an entrance page for my website because I found this to be very professional looking. The screenshot below is the design I came up with. I took some photographs of the clouds in the sky, altered the hue/saturation and mirrored the photography multiple times. It was almost a kaleidoscope effect but it also reminded me a bit of the tie dye patterning sometimes on denim and other materials. As if denim had been bleached or washed out. After doing this I created a title for my project which would be used throughout the website. I named it Denim Doses.

The screenshot below shows what my Homepage would look like. I brought the previous background through to this page aswell as all of the other pages because I found when viewing other websites consistency was important and looked like the site had been well put to together with pages that all linked. I did the same with the title font. Rather than just having links to the next pages like the majority of websites I thought it would be a lot more creative if the links were in the form of pictures instead. I presented these in a circle surrounded by the word denim. Because my page seemed very simplistic I also added in a short quote from Levi Strauss. Aswell as informing the viewers on a little bit about the type of person Levi Strauss is this would also set the context and theme for my website once people had read it.

The screenshots below would be the general look for each page on my website. I again kept the same background and title font/size/colour. I wanted to have quite a structured layout that ran throughout. I decided to have the imagery/text presented in a straight and organised grid like formation. The same amount of text was placed in line with the same size photographs.

After completing the three pages of website that contained all the information I then decided to add a page that had links to my personal blogs, this blogger account aswell as my pinterest boards.

After a lot of consideration I decided to base my website around the material Denim. Denim has been around since the 1900's and is STILL extremely popular today, to me this says a lot about the trends and fashion of denim for it to still be widely popular after all these years. Jacob Davis is the unsung hero of Levis history (the first company to design and manufacture denim), he came up with the idea of strengthening work overalls using copper rivets which are now seen on jeans swell as swapping cotton duck overalls for much more hardwearing denim ones. Jacob helped Levi Strauss & Co to develop denim into a wide spreading fashion trend. They produced baby denim overalls, cord pants, bell bottom jeans, denim jackets and all in one overalls. Although they first became popular in the mining and coaling industry as uniforms it soon became clear that denim was more of a fashion statement than a work uniform when people like Marilyn Monroe were seen wearing denim jeans. By this point Levi Strauss & Co were producing overalls for many major corporations including Coca Cola, Pepsi, Phillips and Ford. Bing Crosby was actually refused entrance to a hotel because he was wearing a denim jacket so Levis made him a custom denim tuxedo! As stated Marilyn really helped make Lee Storm Riders much more famous along with many other famous people and artists. Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Gene Clark Woodstock, Miles Davis, John Lennon, Clint Eastwood, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Peter Black, Max Ernst all wore denim and jeans on a regular basis.