For my final monthly review, I chose to critique my single-page folklore site (The Hare and the Tortoise).  This is the project I am most proud of and think I used all of the elements of design well.  I balanced each image of the story/page with its background.  The characters continue to walk down the center of the page to show time elapsing as the sky changes colors.     Unity was an important part of this project because the characters had to work with each other to tell the story of the race. The colors had to work well together when the characters were moving, they also had to work together. One of the most challenging things about the illustration of the story was the color of the tortoise not running into the color of the grass. All aspects of the site worked well together to create unity throughout the navigation, the individual pages, the fonts chosen, and the illustration.
The main focus of the site was the Hare and the Tortoise. Therefore, the emphasis was focused towards the two characters and their movements. The animation of the tortoise was most important, because he was the main character I was focusing on. The animation with him was a little tricky because I had a little bit of a problem slowing him down, but overall I think that the emphasis on him turned out good. I also used a black slate in the back of the title screen with both characters moving so immediately the user would know which aspects of the site to focus on, which also helped to show emphasis.
The layout of my site was focused on individual pages or sections so that it would read like a book as you scroll.  The layout of the center square is in line with the center of the screen and is fixed so that when you change your window, the image does not scale or move.  Directly to the left of the image is the navigation bar. The color of the navigation bar ties into the color of the Title text. I have the page set up so that you know what to focus on and the nav bar is there to help direct you to the next page.
The color of my site is very bright. The targeted audience for this project was little kids and what better way to grab the attention of a kid than bright colors with simple graphics and animation. The colors reflect the “kid” style and also grabs the attention of any user that stumbles upon the page. I also added shading into the characters to show some depth so it wouldn’t appear to be so flat. The shadows were also added to show distance. I kept the shadows very general so as to keep up with the simplicity of the site. The texture of the site also works into color because the main texture is within the characters. The hare has some added “scruff” and the tortoise has some added darker green colors.  The grass also has texture in it to give it more of an outdoorsy, racing kind of feel. I did not add texture to the ground, other than adding some rocks, because I did not want the ground to take away from the characters, because they were the focus of my site.
In terms of navigation, I thought that the navigation bar, taking you to different sections of the page worked best for this assignment. It is bold, bright and draws just enough attention that a child would know to click on it. Also, at the bottom of the page I added a link that would take you to the actual full story of The Hare and the Tortoise, because again, I kept the text simple.
As a whole, I am proud of how this website turned out. Some of the critique I got from classmates suggested that instead of the navigation bar being a block color in the back, it should be an image, ie a carrot. One thing I thought that was really helpful was the use of my navigation and I applied it to other aspects of my work, such as my homepage.
http://mediaweb.rmu.edu/~sasst44/Hare%20and%20Tortoise/