For my final review, I have decided to critique my single page site, Rapunzel.
When it comes to balance, I believe my single page has accomplished that. The way the castle is in relativity to the window panes works very well and is balanced. The braid coming down from Rapunzel’s hair gives the whole page a more balanced feel. If it would not have been there, it would have been more on the unbalanced side because of the grey brick castle in contrast with the colored window pane scenes. There would have been too much open space. Overall, I think the site is balanced both when it comes down to lines and how the colors are. They go together quite well.
As for unity and emphasis, I think my Rapunzel single page has accomplished both. The site has a lot of unity. Everything goes well together and gives a harmonious, balanced, and complete whole.The window panes are meant to stand out, adding emphasis to the story to go along with the text. They match nicely with the rest of the site, but emphasize different parts of the story appropriately.
The layout itself is very simple and not real complex. It is simple, but modern and very sophisticated in its own way. Very kid friendly looking and plays around with silhouettes and text. Color throughout the single page is very clean, but colorful and gentle to the eyes. No neon colors or very pale colors. My only issue is the way the gradient acted when I split the one big image up into three parts. The gradient did not stay the way it had been, and I am not quite sure how to fix that. Overall, the colors go quite well together and give the site some eye candy when it comes to its appearance with the colors and graphics.
In my single page site I had no navigation. I could have added navigation, but chose not to due to time constraints and the fact that I did not think I needed to. The story is very straightforward and not extremely long, so just scrolling works just fine.
An improvement that could be made is fixing that gradient for one. I am still not sure why it did that the way it did. Another improvement would be to split the images up even more to make loading somewhat faster.
One lesson that I learned with doing this single page site is that I need to split images up more and utilize the slice tool. It would have helped me much more from the start. Another lesson I learned is that not everything can be transferred between Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. Some things I wanted in one program would not transfer very well or at all to another. I wish they worked together more.