17 year old web designer needs some C&C and advice...
Pb (6 points) | Wed, 2006-01-11 03:04Okay, so I've been dabbling with design for the past few years, messing around with Photoshop and HTML/CSS and whatnot, but I'm approaching an opportunity to advance past doing the occasional site for a friend or relative to doing some actual paid freelance work... I've just done a businesscard design for a cousin who's been pretty successful selling assorted types of specialty shoes in return for letting me advertise my amateur design "business" on the backside (he's going to a hip hop trade show of sorts pretty soon, and the business cards will be seen by 1,000+ people, I'm hoping at least one or two will need some sort of design work done). I've been keeping up with this site for a while and read the article on new designers charging too little recently, and was just wondering how much I should charge per site... of course, none of the designs are going to be super-professional, it'll be likely that none of the customers will be expecting anything near proffesional-standard. I'm also probably going to work out domain and hosting solutions with these people, but I don't know if I'll have to work out updating the sites on regular bases.
Anyways, I've been working on this design for a friend on and off for a few weeks now, maybe this could give anyone who would reply to this thread a general idea of my skill level:
http://pb2ya.msshost.com/Norfup_design_draft.jpg
Hopefully, I can get some criticism on this as well. Of course, the main content of the site will be contained within an iframe on the page, which I haven't finished yet. My main concern is the border of the dark blue bar that runs across the page, it looks plain and out of place when compared to the textures of the rest of the design. Also, should I blur the pinpoint of the angle gradient in the logo?
Anyways, any advice, criticism, comments, whatever, would be appreciated. I understand that I have a lot to learn about design in general, and I really don't expect much money at all for my work. Thanks.
OH, and by the way, I did win a copy of Menuet.
...no clue how that's relevant to any of this, just thought everyone should know.
Hola, I am a 17 year old amatuer designer too. (Not a web designer, as such, generally focus on print graphics, typography and photography). I did design a site once for school though. It looks ok, but there are quite a few problems. For one, the typography in the logo's a bit messy. I wopuld consider using another font. At the very least, I would set right the kerning. There is simply too much space after the 'N' while the other letters are nearly blending. I would most definitely blur the pinpoint of the gradient. And I don't know about the colour combination (Dark blues, whit, black?) Somehow it's too dead, and cliched. I would rather have a fresh and bright colour, along with black and white, like say, an earthy shade of orange or a olive/limish green. And I wouldn't have those gradients either. And try and use a single font. Gives it more integrity. And avoid those bevels, look like filter overuse. Nothing spells 'amatuer' like filter overuse in photoshop. BTW, what are you using? GoLive? or Dreamweaver? If you want the icons and element to glow, have them all glowing. And avoid the grille effect on the side bar. I think thts about it. If I'll think of anything else, I'll tell you.