Assignment 3: More Sketches

I wanted to delve deeper into the sketches and elaborate on some of the designs I came up with for last class in this assignment. 

To start, here are a few wireframe ideas for a homepage, including proposed layouts for the header and nav bar. Pay attention the whitespace -- I played around with the amounts here and feel like I've achieved a good balance. 

I am planning on having the dimensions set at 1,000px wide set up with three columns, all at around 300px (perhaps 320?) to leave for cell padding. 

I also wanted to work with rollovers. I'm not looking to get incredibly fancy here, still striving to keep within my simple and streamlined layout. I have decided to go with this color scheme:

http://www.colorcombos.com/color-scheme-275.html

I am leaning towards the salmon color for the rollover, but the pale blue isn't bad either. I may tone down the number of colors that I have in this color scheme, but I feel like I definitely need a bright color for the rollover. I tried seeing how a rollover would look with the dark teal color (on the far left of the watch) and it just didn't pop enough. 

Another idea I have (and may even like the best), is to have a different rollover color for each link in the navbar and have the accent color for that page be the respectful rollover color. Please see the example below. 

Just to be more clear on the changes that I am planning to make (most of which you have seen, others that are still in progress):

• The entire interface of benjamin-taylor.com will be different. The site will be virtually unrecognizable from it's old form. 
• Switch to the font "PT Sans"
• Use a minimal header (using the "ben lebowitz" header logo) and navigation bar.
• For what content will be on the pages of the site, like HOME:
• A teaser of the bio, with a link to "more" bringing you to the "bio" page. 
• A flickr widget, with a few recent photos
• Links to social media
• A twitter status widget (one that I will design, Similar to the benjamin-taylor.com widget, but with the benlebowitz.com color scheme intact)
• A brief capture of my most recent portfolio work with a link to "portfolio" to view more.
• My most recent blog post with a "...more" linking you to my blog, benflips.com
• BIO
• a well-written, 600-700 word bio, almost like a cover letter, but with less professional, corporate language. More candid.
• A picture of myself, no more than 300 x 300px
• PORTFOLIO
• My recent portfolio items
• I want them to all be in thumbnail format and when you click them, they enlarge, but not in another window or screen, just on top of the thumbnails. (see wireframe below)

• MUSIC
• I am tempted here to just link directly to "benjamin-taylor.com," but I am afraid that I am linking too much away from the site. I am stull unsure about this. 
• CONTACT
• A simple page with my contact information.