J. Tony Studios

Project Name: Academy of Art University Main Website Mock-ups

Client: Academy of Art University

Notes: I While I was at the Academy, we went through a very long process of re-designing the site. Due to several personel and political issues involved, 3 separate design projects went near to completion and then were scrapped. In the end we went mostly with just a design overhaul of the front door, leaving the internal pages essentially the same. A new attempt was in the beginning phases when I left the Academy, though none has been implemented.

Here I have included a number of mock-ups that I put together during 2 of these iterations. I'll comment where appropriate. The thing to note is that we had a great deal of information that the various departments wanted on the front page, and not at all enough space to make everyone happy. Many of the organizational ideas I produced in these mock-ups made it into the final front page as it exists now.

Most of these mock-ups were not just created in photoshop, but were actually created in html as well.

FrontDoor1
This was one of the near-final mock-ups with me as original designer and implementor of changes requested during our web site team meetings.

FrontDoor1
This is a mock up that was produced just a little later, with the extra backdrops behind the 3 columns at the bottom.

This is an inside page mock-up to go with the above 2 mock-ups.

FrontDoor1
This was an early idea which wasn't popular, but I still think has some potential. It was early, so the colors and visual design aspects aren't as refined as I'd like.The idea was that, in order to showcase all 12 schools of the University at the time, giving each school a little spot of it's own, with the viewer having to scroll down to see them all. I feel that scrolling down on a front page, frowned on by many, is still a viable way to display information.

The plan was to rotate the positions of the 12 schools so that each time you came to the site, different schools wouid be at the top.

FrontDoor1
This is a mock up of an internal page for the tabbed design. I created the image in the upper right, using stock photos. Copy was written by me, too.

FrontDoor1
Another early one. Here I was experimenting with putting more white space on the page, more breathing room, while still keeping lots of information.

FrontDoor1
Again, working with the concept of "white space" but using the background logo to tie it all together. The 12 schools are displayed on the right with a scroll bar, letting you scroll through three schools at a time.

This was an early version of the first ones posted up above. I really thought the "big pretty" image in our original site was too big, so here I split it into two. The overlay on the right side was flash and would bring up information on the schools when you hovered over them.

FrontDoor1
Another try at the split above, but playing with the vertical instead of the horizontal. It is missing some balance, due to theschool menu on the upper right.

We were asked to create a sort of intranet for students at the University. It was meant to be a place where students could easily access important information with just a few clicks. Above was our first iteration at this. In designing this I tried to stay pretty bare-bones design wise, keeping the information central. The mini bus schedule turned out to be very popular (before this it had always been a paper based schedule (and confusing at that).

FrontDoor1
This was a mock up for the bulletin board colors, etc. It was not implemented.