Capstone Advisory Report
Following my Flowerseed capstone project, we also were given the opportunity to meet with a professional designer to provide us with guidance and advice for making our projects even better. The advisor I met with is Mandy Pflantz from Pheonix Creative.
After presenting my capstone project to Mandy, she made several helpful suggestions to me. Looking at the website homepage that I made for Flowerseed, she recommended that my website header contain a singular image with the text overlap and a call to action shop button. She also recommended I look into a different language for a “shop now” button, which instead could tie reference back to my paper, seeds, and growth vocabulary. We also were looking at my color palette, and she suggested a secondary, more discreet call-to-action color which could be a golden yellow I had used previously.
Making Adjustments
Out of all the helpful suggestions Mandy made to me, I will be moving forward with her advice for my first product, a website home page. The upper portion of my website I think should contain a single image with overlapping text. We agreed that this composition was more interesting for the user to experience. Other suggestions I will be implementing into my final composition website are:
- Weight variations for my serif typeface
- Golden-yellow secondary call-to-action color
- A modular setup for my mobile webpage version
When presenting my ideas to Mandy, I felt prepared with the amount of work I had prepared leading up to presentation. By showing the process work of my logo identity, visual presentation, and my first product’s compositions, I was able to set a stable foundation for my brand that is visually presentable in a way that felt real enough. Getting feedback from Mandy about how she felt my brand was on a good path and strong in its beginning stages felt great to know that I had been doing something right.
Future Presentations
When presenting in the future, I want to try to think more about each slide and what topics of discussion I want to fit in per slide. In the moment of presentation it is bound for things to slip, so having a simple note guide for talking points would be good to have on hand if needed.
When designing presentation slides, I also want to take more time to make the descriptive text smaller and the imagery bigger. It is natural for me to want to put all of my information down and then design around it. Often I have to go back and edit it all out to make my presentation light and easy to run through. For viewers, I want my presentations to be intuitive. I don't want them to have to read through a paragraph of my descriptive text that takes away from my actual work, the star of the show.
