In my initial layout of ideas, I laid out the important aspects of a well designed website.
How is the architecture of the navigation?
Clarity and ease of use?
What fonts and colours to use and what they convey?
How the composition of the website is as whole and who I'm aiming it at?

I moved on to making a brief wire frame of the websites' navigation with aims to keep things simple and have consistent design.

DESIGN

I then went towards the area of designing something more unique, I was struggling with the idea of going with a monochrome theme or a more creative colour scheme; the latter being more difficult to pull off in a professional manner.

Limited use of font meant I had compromise as I didn’t want to do the bulk of the design in Photoshop, I wanted to keep most things native to the HotGlue toolset.

I had this theme in my head of Bauhaus; simplicity and efficiency.
I would just be using the primary colours and different shapes to create the modules in the web page.

At the same time I had an idea for linked long rectangles being woven into one another with varying degrees of monochrome; dark grey, black, light grey, white to show shadow.

I took a step back and realised I was over-analysing in a project that is more about the content than the design.

Going over the same things with the aims of trying to solidify an approach to the design, so I could get on with creating.

I had another idea with a ribbon effect, but felt it was unrealistic and so cast it aside.

I decided on the woven linked rectangles but with the colour instead. After going to WDC, the last lecturer influenced me to try out a slightly more "silly" approach.

Gavin Strange gave a really great lecture covering a lot of things, but the way he designed the Aardman Studios website stuck with me. It had character, a certain charm and although it was unrealistic to try and achieve that within HotGlue I felt that the direction I need to take was in a more colourful direction.

I was still undecided as to whether to stick solely to the primary colours or to deviate and when two colours meet, the resulting rectangle coming off the two connections would be the colour the two colours mixed would result in.

I was thinking more about this quirky approach to the design, to maybe have some of the text split and mimic some of the clunkiness of HotGlue in some of my design.

I also had a quick think about how to name my website to reflect a different approach, so had a quick brainstorm to use my last name as a descriptive device; Rough Drafts.