Beginning Header

Using the palette from earlier I began to look at the menu. For some reason I was inspired by this music cover in terms of the blue with stripes of different shades and the look of scratches on it.

So I went into Photoshop and tried to imagine my own interpretation of that. This is what I eventually came up with just as an idea inspired by that.

I then looked at buttons and knew that keeping them blue was the best option as it would unify the header, so I put a simple blue gradient on them and then a blue-purple one on every second one. It's very subtle and must be looked at closely to know the difference but would look different with just the same scheme for each button. It's also in line with what I researched because the websites with favourite design in recent times had very simple menus with minimal variation. The colours also worked well because the text could easily be seen in either black or white with the rollover images I'd created out of the normal menu. This was my chance to explore lots of different fonts (since they were images) without worrying about compatibility.

At this stage I also decided to shrink the size of the site from the most popular of 1366x768 to 1024x1024 because even though there was a lot of information I didn't anticipate that there'd be quite enough to justify having a page as long as 1366, and the huge amount of spaciousness on the trendy websites I'd researched was one element of them that I didn't particularly like. The right amount of space is good but I also like my websites a bit more compacted. I also don't know this for sure but I'd imagine a smaller website would be easier to view on a phone or tablet as well.

The header was almost done. I'd saved the Witt Art logo from the resources folder and had to figure out what size to make it and where to position it in the header exactly. For horizontal positioning centre, in between the first button and left side of the page seems good, but vertically I wasn't sure. One one of the sites I researched the logo hung down almost to the bottom of the header and the buttons stayed at the very top of the page. I remember this particular look struck me as quite visually nice, so I decided to go with this.