COMPOSITE

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

This website will represent Jean-Paul and myself, who we are and what we have to offer. Tropicalboubou is our trademark, the name of our website and our e-mail address. The tropical boubou is a bird we have in our garden. It is black and white and not especially beautiful compared to a lot of other species in this region, but we like them because they are monogamous and once they are pair- bonded, they can sing up to 12 different highly synchronised duets that are beautiful. Somehow we feel close to that... We are crafts people dedicated to quality, integrity and personal exchanges. We intend to offer paid and free information and services on a professional and personal level. The main area of professional services is translation and related activities, i.e. editing, proof-reading, glossaries. In time, and maybe as a free service to start with, the second main area will be related to design i.e. website, artwork, logo. The personal pages will offer free information related mainly to traveling and the places we have lived in, i.e. tips, links to interesting websites, travel writing, articles. Our aim is to create an holistic and organic website which will grow and change with time, and will offer an opportunity to exchange ideas and-or services. We will not depend on this website to earn a living. Our audience will primarily come from links to our website from the translation community. Many people will probably access our website through internal pages whether professional or personal. The private page will be dedicated to family and friends only, and will be accessible through a password.

Week 1

week 1 composite

Week 2

It has been very difficult to write the statement of purpose above, and I am not sure that it is complete or precise enough yet. This idea of a website doesn't really fit with the three main types of websites as defined by Flanders: informational, commercial or for entertainment. It will be a bit of all but with a difference, maybe a human dimension...It might not work at all, and if it doesn't then maybe we don't belong to the web community :) As I said, we will not depend on this website to earn a living so we want to try a different approach that is closer to who we are.

week 2 composite

For this second week, I have mainly streamlined the design, make it less busy. I also had a try at the logo, which has also changed place. The three main links will have sub-navigation roll-over. The copyright information will come below this main box, along with the sub-navigation for each page (professional, personal, private). The internal pages will be similar but the professional page for example might expend horizontally, with a picture or artwork occupying the private box, and the personal page might expand vertically with a picture or artwork within the professional page space, etc. The aim is to keep the unity by using the same spaces but adding variety by using the spaces differently. Some pages will look different, because of the extended content, i.e. glossary or writing pages. They will open if possible as an attached document in a completely different window, and will only have a smaller logo on top and copyright info at the bottom, but no navigation bar. That's as far as I've gone this week. Even if it doesn't show much difference from last week, it has involved a lot of thinking and discussions with JP and helped us focus on what we wanted to do.

Week 4

week 4 composite

This week, I re-scaled everything to fit the browser grid, and re-aligned everything using a 5mm squares grid. I also added pattern. This pattern will fill the background to the site. I didn't have time to introduce value or the other composition rules but will think about it for week five.

Week 5

I have been struggling to get further than the original idea, and reworked it several times. I've learned to let go ideas that did not work but felt really frustrated and stuck at one point, thinking that I could not do it, and that I was way over my head. But, thanks to JP encouragements and numerous cups of coffee, I persisted and came up with something that pleases me for the time being. I had to roughly design the three main inner pages to show what I had in mind concerning use of space and color schemes. Hope you do not mind.

Here are the color schemes for the three inner pages, the essence of those colors are also in the words professional, personal and private and in the pictures on the home page.

professional:
I chose earthy colors with one contrasting to represent the genuine, classic but with a twist, down to earth side of our professional selves. I think they are also warm but stylish colors.

personal:
Blue had to be in for the personal aspect. It is the color of the ocean and the sky, it is cool and warm and calm, the contrasting orange is for the exotic, fruity and energetic.

private:
Pinks and lemon green , flashy yet warm colors, the private part is where we can be more outgoing, funny and colorful.

I chose the font Palatino through out, except for the logo which is IT American. I like Palatino because it is round but not too fancy.
The grassy border is not an actual border but will be the site background.

Home page

week 5 composite home page

Professional inner page

week 5 composite professional inner page

Personal inner page

week 5 composite personal inner page

Private inner page

week 5 composite private page