For my final review I chose to critique my one-page site, which was about the story of The Ugly Duckling.  This project was the one that I was most happy with throughout the semester. I think I used the element of design in it well, with improvements in a few areas.

For Balance I think I accomplished this well throughout my site. For the title page of my folklore, I have three ducks, grass reeds on each side and title in text above it and felt that it balanced out well together. For the other pages I think the background with a some being a barn with hills, and a sun, or a river balanced out well with what was going on in the foreground in each page for instance in some I had a nest with hatching ducklings, the ugly duck running away, swans swimming in the water with the ugly duckling looking on. I also think the placement of my text boxes works well in balancing each page.

For unity I also think I showed this well in my site. I the elements of each part of the story were balanced and went well together in the colors, graphics, backgrounds and text I used. I feel that each page goes together well but the site as a whole goes well together and gets the story of the ugly duckling across well especially to children.  For Emphasis I also think this was accomplished well.  I tried to put more emphasis on certain graphics on each page that were the important part of the story for instance on my second page I have a gray speckled egg that is bigger and is not hatching like all the other eggs and in the story that is a big thing because the momma duck doesn’t remember laying that egg and it is different from all the others.

For layout I think I did well with this aspect of the site but there are always room for improvements.  I wanted my layout to scroll horizontally rather than vertically because I wanted it to feel like a storybook. I also divided my “scenes” of the story into different pages next to each other so again it would feel like a book and you would just scroll through them.  I also laid out some of the pages so they had the same  hills,farm and sun while the foregrounds changed.

For color I think what I had worked well, I used mostly simple bright colors to make it kid friendly the only thing I used a gradient on was the sky and the hills. I wanted to keep thing simple so things wouldn’t be distracting and take away from the story. For texture as with color I wanted to keep it simple so for some things it is just plain shapes for instance the river and the ground in front of it is just rectangles with color. While behind the river I used a gradient to try and give the sky and hills texture. The barn has texture in it with all the lines and graphics that help to make it look like a barn. My ducks have a little bit of texture to it with the shape making it look like wings, the feet, eyes and beak. On the title page the grass reeds have some texture with the watercolor stroke I used and the water marks help to give it the feel of a river. Lastly for Navigation this is the one thing I would change about my page and wish I had done better. I wish I had put in navigation buttons to help move from page to page instead of having to keep scrolling left to right to get to the end.

Improvements I would want to make on this site would be to add navigation buttons for one thing. I feel that navigation buttons would really help especially if little kids were on this site. I also would like to add maybe a little bit on animation to some of elements like the ducklings, the ugly duck, swans and mama duck. I also would change the the size of the text in some of the text boxes and make those look better. Lessons learned from this project that I can apply to others is navigation and scrolling, using fireworks for photos and how that can help bring things together. I also will use divs in my future projects to help make things easier to find and organize.