I chose to critique my single-page site, illustrating the folklore “Old Sultan.” The layout of my site is very simple. I illustrated each scene within a picture frame, so the user feels as though a story is being told. In terms of design, I believe it was very successful. I kept the style of illustration the same throughout each scene to create unity from one frame to the next. Texture, however, is not something I incorporated as well. Most of my illustrations were flat in color and lines were used to create as much texture as possible. Although this is the case, I find the contrast between the illustrations and the texture of the frame to work well overall. As per the actual story text, I wanted this part to be emphasized the most. Since most of my images were flat, adding a simple drop shadow element to the text box made it pop off the webpage.

As far as navigation, I placed arrows within the text box so the user can read each section of the story. Each frame had multiple “slides” of text; to illustrate this I animated some of the elements. This way multiple scenes could be incorporated and easily understood within each frame. However, a bit more work and thought could have been put into it. I was so caught up with getting the jQuery to function correctly, that I overlooked important aspects that the user may want to take advantage of. I did not include an option for the user to go back to the previous part of the text. If they wanted to go back and reread a certain section, they were unable to. Instead, the user has to refresh the page and start from the beginning. I didn’t think about how the user is not going to be as well informed about the page as I am; this large mistake will most likely confuse the user, or cause them to get lost.

For future projects, I need to decide on the navigation I will be using and how I want to the user to move through the site before I begin designing anything. I got half way through and realized that there were problems, but it was too late to fix them. Overall, I am very happy with the way the site turned out visually. The aspect I would love to redo is the navigation technique that I used.