Advertising

For my senior project, I wanted to create a website that can display a portfolio of my most effective work through my experiences. There have been several times where I have started one, but I have never completely followed through.
To start, I looked into getting a proper domain. I wanted to have a straightforward site and luckily was able to pick up evanscow.com (my name)! I wanted to have this site represent my personality alongside my portfolio, so I selected my favorite color: orange. I created a style guide and color palette to match this color. Type was also instrumental in following style, so I chose a bold sans serif font. After feeling confident with the color and type, I created a wireframe and continued to develop it.
With the basic idea drawn out, I started creating the actual site. Text size and weight became very important because they create visual interest. I selected a serif font for my body text to make it easier to read. From there, I began adjusting the weight of sentences and rearranging type to seem less of a resume and more of an experience. This aspect of the project took a deceptively long time. Streamlining a website to be as easy to navigate as possible took hours of tedious searching to identify a problem, learning how to solve problems, and then implementing the necessary changes. Even when a fix was made, issues would arise elsewhere.
Choosing which works to showcase was a difficult endeavor. One of my driving messages through the site is my ability to work well with many forms of media whether it be audio, visual, or copy. To organize this into a more developed idea, I incorporated every form into my gallery. I wanted to demonstrate work in typography, iconography, posters, copywriting, pixel art, instructional graphics, audio, and animation. Understanding that I am graduating with an emphasis in advertising, I utilized sample ad work that I felt displayed good examples of my range.



I spent a total of 61 hours on this project.
Planning and researching: 8 hours
Core site elements: 7 hours
Site polishing: 12 hours
Portfolio design / Implementation: 15 hours
Accessibility / User interface: 16 hours
Presentation: 3 hours