Wireframes

Now as I have said in pretty much all of my posts so far; I want this website to be simple. Clean, elegant and easy to navigate for reasons I've mentioned countless times now. With that in mind I set about making some wireframes in Illustrator. It was quite a quick process. I didn't want to overthink it in anyway. I wanted to quickly put down what I thought to be a quintessentially simple website layout. And this is the result:

So, as I said, simple. I wanted to make the home page exactly as I would like a homepage for an event like this to be. Being a musician I am looking for a few things really. The event information (dates and location), which brands will be attending and where I can purchase tickets. This fulfils all of those goals succinctly. The logo section will also contain information regarding the location and timings.

This layout is very simple, spacious and welcoming. Exactly what you would want from a home screen. I got inspiration from a few of the sites I have visited before. Namely the Dallas Guitar Festival and the Half Rez conference in Chicago.

Source: https://www.guitarshow.com

Source: http://halfrez.com

As you can see, I drew quite a lot of inspiration from these two sites. The Half Rez site in particular really spiked my interest. I love the simplicity of it. The flat colours and the informal language goes together really nicely. It may be something to look at when structuring my content.

Structurally speaking though they are very much alike. The Half Rez site is lacking a navigation bar; but apart from that they have very similar principles. A logo and information in and around that regarding dates and locations. Then below that who's attending. This is such a good way to market an event of any kind. It is everything you need to put forward. It is straight to the point and packs enough clout to draw the visitors eye and hopefully inspire them to attend.

These sites are definitely something to aspire to echo. When it comes to content pages though it falls apart somewhat. The Half Rez site has no other pages to speak of really and the Dallas Guitar Festival's content pages are fairly poorly constructed.

With that in mind I set about creating a page in a similar style, again focussing on simplicity and ease of use. This is a wireframe for a page with some media content like a map or interactive widget:

Again, clean and simple design is the key to this. I think that the spacious design helps to focus the eye to the map and information and makes it more digestible. In a similar vein, this is an example of a page with video elements on it:

The video page will flow with a natural broken progression. I like the off kilter weightiness to the information below the video. The fact that the content is broken in two and that break is not centralised. It adds interest and draws the eye to the information rather than it merely blending into the background. 

As you can probably tell the structure of my site will take after the modern web movement of simplicity and space. I really like the design principles that have become commonplace in contemporary websites and it is something I haven't seen implemented in this area of web design for a music conference. It will be fun and liberating to try and make it work.