Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Start the storyboard from the top down. Rough out the space for a banner or
personal logo. Rough up the space for the navigation items and position them
on the page approximately where you feel they should go. This decision is
critical because it will be followed through on other pages. Without consistent
navigation from the start, you and your user will be lost.
After establishing the identity and banner considerations, you should designate
the live area for content placement. This live area will hold text, graphics, and
multimedia items that reside on the page. Once you have established a home
page, you want to follow the navigation design throughout the rest of the
storyboards to establish continuity. If you need additional navigation items, you
can sketch in sub navigation which can be customized as content and needs
dictate.
You should be creating storyboards for each page that changes. As you are
beginning to create your storyboards you may want to rough out as many as you
can to practice this conceptual process. Remember, the storyboard needs to
tell the story, not be a high level illustration. The time you spend creating
storyboards should be utilized in the process of thinking, analyzing, and
designing the visual framework for an engaging Web communication experi-
ence.
Conclusion
At this point, you should have thought about and possibly completed
conceptualization, information design, and visual design of your Web portfolio.
This chapter has given you some ideas as to what can go into a Web portfolio
and given you some instruction on how to assemble the site visually, on paper
in the form of storyboards. You should have established a tentative layout for
the Web pages and you should be able to assume where the content will reside
inside the Web page designs. The content items must be formatted to fit into the
Web page layout you designed in the story boards.
With an idea about what you want the Web portfolio to look like and how it will
work, all of the items for the Web portfolio must be gathered and manipulated
into a Web-based format. In some cases, artifacts and assets may need to be
developed from scratch or converted from paper or application formats. We
will explore these processes and tasks in the next chapter.
