Topic: College Art Gallery Page

http://www.stonybrook.edu/stuaff/artgallery/

This is a page I designed for an Art Gallery on campus. It is just the shell right now, content to be inserted later.

Anyone mind tearing it down?

XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS compliant.

Well, at first glance, I don't see much to comment on. I like the color scheme--it has a nice feel and is appropriate to the subject. After looking at it for a while, though, there are a few things that nag at me. First off, you'll want to correction "Misson" to "Mission" (that was an easy one). Second, I'm not sure if I like the menu, especially the bullets. You already have the page split up by the red lines into three very clear areas: title, menu, and content. I'm not sure that you need the bullets on top of that; it might look cleaner without them. You also might want to make the menu text bigger; sitting right beneath the very large title and to the left of the large subtitle "Mission Statement," the small menu text really gets lost.

Which brings up another point: mission statement? If you're a company, I might understand having a mission statement, but for this to be the first thing I see on an art gallery page... it just rubs me the wrong way. It totally kills the feeling of "art" I was getting from the color scheme and turns the site into a political statement. Not that I have any problem with the content of the mission statement, I would just couch it differently. Let's take the first paragraph, for example:

quote:

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The mission of the Art Gallery in the Student Activities Center is to present a cross-cultural perspective of the arts to the Stony Brook community. Each exhibition's goal is to present diversity in the form of cultural awareness, in providing an understanding of a variety of art forms, and to educate our audience through the arts experience of viewing original artwork. The exhibitions are planned to present issues on a broad range of social, recreational, educational and cultural themes to foster an collaborate with the aims of Stony Brook University. We aim to present the work of outstanding artists regardless of race, creed, color, sex, or country of origin.

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This copy strikes me as being one step removed from where you want to be. Compare:

"The mission of the Art Gallery... is to present...." with "The Art Gallery presents...."

"Each exhibition's goal is to present...." with "Each exhibition presents...."

"The exhibitions are planned to present...." with "The exhibitions present...."

"We aim to present the work...." with "We present the work...."

See what I mean? Don't tiptoe around what you want to say, go straight at it. Also, you might look into some synonyms for "present"--it crops up in each sentence in that first paragraph. At any rate, now that we've removed "mission" from the paragraph, we can remove it from the title. Why do you need "Mission Statement" under "About the Art Gallery"? Just make it "About the Art Gallery" and you're good to go.

Final thoughts: the two icons at the bottom of the menu are kind of jarring--they don't seem to fit in. Design-wise, I guess the menu makes me the most uncomfortable. Content-wise, I would recommend you think about your copy and what you want it to convey. Remember that your message is not just what you say, but how you say it. Sorry to take up so much space here talking about that.




Cell 270

The menu: Great observation. I will get on that as soon as I get into work tomorrow. I think your right about it 100%. I can't say much more about that than, thanks for the input.

The title: oops... my bad. You can probabally tell what a horrible speller I am from all of the response I have written here. I'll fix that one immediately.

The content: I really have no control over this. I will bring it up to the lady who is in charge of the content. Maybe she will do something about it. She is 60+ year old spaced out of her mind woman... I am really only responsible for the design. Thanks for the ideas on that though.

The logos: Its funny, those logos were the only requirement I had. I had to have 3 circular logos. One for the Student Activities Center, one for the School and one for a future donar. I didn't do the donar one yet so I have to wait on that. I tried placing the logos in all different places, but I have yet to figure out where they would best fit. I am sure that I can change them around a bit. I am kinda stuck on the colors (maybe some slight variations), but I am sure I can change it up a bit placement etc. Do you have any sugestions on this? I know there has to be some way of making them look better. I just am lost for ideas on how, maybe change up the lettering, mover it to a different place, wrap it around the circle. I am not sure. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Anything on my code? Is it coded OK? do I have some glaring errors? I checked it agains XHTML1.0 Transitional as well as CSS via W3 as shown on the bottom, but that doesn't mean the code is great, or even decent.

A cousin of mine is going to stoneybrook

Ah, no control over content, eh? That must be annoying. If I were designing the site, I would make sure that the tagline read something like "designed by..." and "content by..."--just to distance myself from that insipid copy. 60+ year old spaced out of her mind woman? So there's not much hope, is there? Well, I suppose you can take comfort in the fact that it's out of your hands.

Logos... hmmm. That's a rough one, definitely. Do they have to go in the menu, though? What about having them along the bottom of the page? That way they would be outside the main area and wouldn't clash as much with the design. At least the colors don't clash--looking at the logos now, I'm getting the impression that the site colors may have been dictated by the Student Activities Center logo.

Code: Well, I'm not a code expert, but I didn't notice any glaring problems in your code. One thing I would suggest, though: make your stylesheet external and link to it. This will help when you start getting more pages--it'll be a lot easier to make changes too.

I will be putting the style sheet external. I left it internal for testing purposes. It is much easier for those reviewing the site not to have to go searching to find the style sheet.

I'll see about putting the logos at the bottom, that might work well. Colors were dictated to me by: http://www.stonybrook.edu/ I just wanted to make it similar to the main page (another one I have no control over). The colors in reality could be anything. You will notice it looks nothing like http://www.stonybrook.edu/stuaff/ which is the department the Art Gallery is under.

Everything is very weird at my school.... Guyo your cousin should like it, just make sure your cousin knows how to study.