Venting

[elfs]

In early 2007, the South King County Domestic Violence Task Force asked me to design a simple "poster"-style website for them for their Stop Domestic Violence walk-a-thon. Now, I don't remember all of the details about why they asked me; it had something to do with their graphic designer being some old hand with lots of commercial paper skills but no HTML, and they needed the HTML now. That thumbnail to the right (click on it for a bigger screenshot) is what I came up with, based on a PDF of the original trifold pamphlet. I used their color scheme and riffed it with a pseudo-calico wallpaper to suggest home coziness, and then pulled out my color wheel to get the dark green contrast into the footer. It's a little distracting, now that I look at it, but it's okay. The bullets I hand-cleaned from a crop of the banner, and getting the DIV into the right place was a lot of fun, let me tell ya. I'm not a graphic designer; most of my intelligence is back-end implementation of the stuff designers do. But this was very straightforward; anyone should have been able to handle it. I think the whole design took me maybe four hours once I put my mind to it.

This is what the designer came up with now that she's learned a little HTML. It's a mess. First, the logo isn't properly dithered, so it has all those horrible jaggies on it. The color scheme of dark pink and gray suggests sexual violence (if I were to post this color scheme to ColourLovers, I'd name it "date rape"), and the lowered contrast of black and gray is just irresponsible. The buttons to the left are image tags, badly mangled. And why the heck is there a visitor's counter on the bottom? Why is the black separator so big, and why doesn't it really separate anything since the pink of the menu bleeds into the pink of the background?

I guess I'm miffed. What was wrong with my design that the 2008 version is considered "an improvement?"

Comments

[taerin.livejournal.com]

My guess is that she doesn't have enough skill to edit the page you created and needed something with current information on it. Without enough time to figure it out or budget to get hold of you again, she just created a new page so there would be something out there with this year's information on it.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Without enough time to figure it out or budget to get hold of you again, she just created a new page so there would be something out there with this year's information on it.

Also, hon, the woman who originally contact you last year to do this isn't in the district anymore..she moved. So she doesn't know how to get hold of us anyway. :( She probably is looking at that and wishing that she knew where we were.