In the Kitchen with Web-Design

Within my master's I'm creating several prototype websites to demonstrate how illustration can effectively fulfill the roles of visual imagery online, and one is a cupcake bakery website. There are approximately thirty businesses in Perth that sell cupcakes as a primary or secondary specialty so it's an opportunity to prove illustration can differentiate entities in saturated markets.

To create the web-site for this fake cupcake bakery of course I need the rights to product images. Rather than buying cupcakes and photographing them, I decided to bake and decorate my own so I've been having a lot of adventures in making fancy cupcakes, with edible glitter generously sprinkled throughout these experiments. Luckily those who would call me mad for going this far for a prototype have been soothed by my delicious research and development.

Last semester I made Orchid Diversity, a site about orchids for a unit about creating educational and interactive web-sites. It was also a good project for me as in creating an educational site I had to cater for users with various learning styles, so it was a good opportunity to use illustration as a teaching tool.

Illustration can be a great element to integrate in designs, with its “subtle charm and strong decorative quality” (Key 1899, 14). I believe however that the form illustrations take needs to be determined by the manner in which users interact with them. The form of illustrations used in the online environment may need to be different from the form of those used in publication design. Designs in the online environment need to function well within the technical constraints and rapidly communicate and persuade, because the behaviour of users:

“...(if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for.” (Krug 2006, 21).

I’m currently studying an Applied Masters in design, and my central research question is how to create effective illustrations for use in the online environment. This blog will chronicle some of my investigations, experiments, and findings.

The coelacanth illustration I’ve shown here is a close up of the first illustration I produced for use in a web-site design.

References
Key, M. 1899.The Passing of the Poster. Brush and Pencil 4(1): 12-19. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25505393 (accessed August 1, 2011).

Krug, S. 2006. Don’t Make Me Think! Berkeley: New Riders.