Web Design | Neufang

The Event

Dogs for Dogs is a small event that was created spur of the moment by my sister and brother-in-law. It was supposed to be just a fun little family event, but through word of mouth it has grown into a full-blown party. Because of the large turn-out of family, friends, and friends-of-friends that wish to participate or simply observe, they decided to bring some good from the event. They named the SPCA as the official benefactor of Dogs for Dogs. I decided to make my website to further promote the event. If the turn-out goes as well as expected, we may make this design into the website for years to come.

Colors

I started by scanning a napkin with the traditional picnic-plaid design. I used it as a background, and took the red color and used it for the text in the header. I also used a lot of yellow for the reference to mustard and to invoke excitement (and hunger). I continued this gestalt throughout the website, only switching to blue for links since it is the traditional link color and will help make the website more user-friendly.

Typeface

I used Impact for the header, because as its name suggests it has power to grab the users attention. Lucida Handwriting Italic was used for the “1st Annual,” because I thought it had the feel of a traditional picnic promo poster or sign. The rest of the website uses Geneva regular because I wanted a nice, easy-to-read, sans serif typeface. It is a little more interesting than Helvetica because it isn’t used quite as often, but still it isn’t distracting.

Photos

This website is simply fun. I used a lot of pictures of dogs and hotdogs. I even went as far as to make my navigation bar out of hot dogs, and the mouse-over effect of taking a bite out of the hot dog will hopefully make a few people laugh. I hope that the weiner-dog in the heading will convince many people that they love animals enough to come to the event. I love the picture of the champion hot dog eater and hope that it is inspiring to anyone who wishes to take a stab at winning such a ridiculous contest. Of course, I had to include pictures of real pets that people could adopt, although I wanted to stay away from the sad looking animals that the SPCA usually uses to encourage people to donate. I think the animals I chose are beautiful (and you can really adopt them right now. If it were a live website I might have some script that would link each pets picture to the petfinder.com page where they can get more information. I thought the smiling dog on the final page was a nice way to conclude a person’s visit to the website.