An essay on the lives and work of the three female pentagram partners, and the creation of building a webpage using HTML, CSS and Javascript.
To begin this project I had to select a designer/designers that were going to be the main subject of my web essay. I chose the first three female partners of Pentagram, I had heard of Pentagram before and knew this is a very successful design studio that has provides many great news articles and has incredible designers working within it. I was really interested in Pentagram and genuinely wanted to learn more about it.
I started by researching as much as I could about Pentagram through books, web articles, and their own website. After I had a basic understanding of Pentagram and its aims and missions, I started to look into the three female partners my essay will be based on- Paula Scher, Natasha Jen, and Giorga Lupa. Using podcasts, more books and more web articles I was ready to start writing my essay.
For my Project I wanted the design of my webpage to reflect the iconic Pentagram Website. For the colour palette iI knew I wanted to use a strong red and black throughout, which is a constant theme throughout their website.
This influence gave me a direction to follow when starting my design process. For typography, I wanted to use the same typeface as well to showcase the influence of Pentagram’s website.
I created the webpage on Figma in which I will be transferring it to Framer, a no coding tool to make the webpage functional. The design on Figma came out really well and I was happy with the layout of the text and images. I had never used Framer before and was interested in how well I could use a no coding tool.
As soon as I transferred the design on Figma over to Framer, I was immediately having issues such as layout. I had to really mess about with framers tools in order to get the layout of context, images and titles to even just appear on the screen. I worked on this for such a long time, but many problems were still occurring. I tried to watch tutorials, and do research into how to fix the problems I was having, however with a lack of time left I couldn't fully solve them. I had to make the decision if I wanted to either restart or continue. I felt like if I noted down all my struggles with this project on my blog it may benefit me for future projects.
I was slightly disappointed as I really enjoyed this project, I loved learning about the three women and also thought my essay was well written. The subject of the project was one of my favourites I have completed so far. Something I wish I had done differently would be to complete sketches, due to the problems I was having with Framer I needed a backup layout to use. These sketches could've provided me with a different layout which might have worked better with Framer.
Another thing I wish to have done in this project was ask for more help, I think if I had a bit of assistance with Framer this could've led to a more functional webpage. Overall, the issues were only small and not exactly how I wanted but I still had fun working on this and learned new skills such as decision making that will be vital in future projects. On a more positive note, I don’t feel terrible about this project not turning out exactly how I wanted as I know how hard I worked, and the time and effort that I made.