Light Alasady
s3955343 (RMIT)
U3187605 (UC)
Bachelor of Design (Digital Design) (RMIT)
Bachelor of Industrial & Communication Design (UC)
So, what exactly is “Lighting up your week?”
Well, to put it simply, the website is designed to be a self reflective, and informative hybrid between portfolio and my weekly blog entries for classes. When deciding on the name, I wanted it to be something that clearly represented the sort of person I am. When deciding on this, I deliberately chose to incorporate my name into the title of the website to give it my own personal satisfaction, however I also wanted it to be able to provide a sense of humour by making the sites name a pun. I believe it’s important that considering the website will be targeted at not just myself, but at my tutors and potential employers in the future, that it will be important to display my sense of humour and personality through even minute details. It’s important to be formal, polite, and well directed, but I also believe it’s important to be who you are, and sell yourself as a person. I felt that choosing the title “Lighting up your week” would be a clever way to delightfully put a spin on the weekly format of the blog posts, while also keeping in the thematic of representing myself. Long term I intend to design products that are focused around health, happiness, and the wellbeing of others, and historically, friends of mine have jokingly used the phrase “the Light of their lives”, which inspired me to incorporate the “Lighting up” aspect. Ultimately, I wanted to draw on aspects that represented me, and what my goals as a designer are, to create a website named after those elements.
Why did you decide to focus on yourself, your tutors, and potential employers?
My first instinct was that in designing this website, what would be the best way to engage myself with my studies and utilize the site meaningfully. Upon further discussions with my tutor and friends, I figured that I could design this website to be a tool for me to enter the industry long term, and a ‘safe haven’ for storing my blog posts for my current and future studies. Ideally, I want to craft the site as a means for reflecting upon my own work, seeing how my understanding has developed over time, and to be able to critically think about what I can take out of them in the future. Designing the site for my own means was important, but also as a means for my tutors across subjects currently, and in future. I believe that it would be important for my tutors to be able to track my design progress and see how I am going. That way they can get an idea for the sort of person that I am, the way I reflect across the subjects I study, and what my design intentions will be for the future. Last but not least, the final audience I have in mind is future employers. I wanted to craft the site to be user friendly, and accessible to anyone in the industry to discover more about my work and who I am. This influences my overall layout to keep it simplistic and easy to navigate, while also prompting me to express my personality out through my decisions in both text and website design. The balancing act between myself, my tutors, and employers, is what I personally believed to be the perfect combination for expressing myself, understanding and creating good website layout, and having all my work accessible in one place.
“I figured that I could design this website to be a tool for me to enter the industry long term, and a ‘safe haven’ for storing my blog posts for my current and future studies.”
“I wanted to craft the site to be user friendly, and accessible to anyone in the industry to discover more about my work and who I am.”
Who exactly are the Persona’s you’ve based your website on?
Utilizing the website https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona I developed three different persona’s to represent my audience.
Self Persona
Tutor Persona
Employer Persona
What’s the overall theme you’re going for here?
The overall theme for the site is a representation of comfort, curiosity, and reflection. I aim to create a more comforting tone with the deliberate use of overall colour choice, specific images, and specific ways of writing in my blog posts. My goal as a designer long term is to be one who focuses on health and happiness, which I believe would tie exceptionally well into a website that’s presented as open, comfortable, and casual/formal. It’s crucial to me that I incorporate my personality into the overall feel of the website where I feel it represents myself best. In order to encapsulate that particular theme, the deliberate use of deep blue for the background creates a friendly user experience that is gentle on the eyes. From personal experience, very bright, or high contrast colours on screen can lead to an uncomfortable, or quite confronting experience, which isn’t what I’m aiming for. Sticking with the blue colour, I opted for a lighter shade of blue for the text, which provides the same level of comfort that the background offers, without losing the overall thematic of calm and comfort. For the use of images, I wanted to keep within the idea of “comfort”, but still encompass the ideas of creativity and exploration. This led to my choice of using a dim light filter over several of the photos on the site in order to keep within the cooler tones of the website, creating a consistent colour scheme. I also decided to use an image I took while visiting the country of a walkway in nature, which I believe represents the journey that I will be undertaking at university and beyond. In future, I will be keeping within the thematic of cooler colours and nature images to further emphasize the calm and comfortable nature of the website. Last but not least, I wanted to demonstrate my personality through the words I write and descriptions I type. Ideally, I aim to make it sound incredibly reflective, thoughtful, and provide insight into the way I think through deliberate language choices. A crucial part of providing a comforting experience is the text that accompanies the looks. By making blog posts use literate language, but still contain positive, optimistic, and my honest thoughts, I believe enables the user to gain a stronger sense of connection to understanding my thoughts and personality. Ultimately, all of these factors will create the sense of atmosphere, comfort, and enchantment that I aim for with my website.
Lighting Up Your week 