Interface Project & Rationale

Not-for-profit Site Audience
Guide Dogs for the Blind’s audience ranges from people helped by guide dogs to people interested in adopting a retired guide dog to friends and family members of those needing guide dogs. People can use the website to apply to be a volunteer, adopt dogs, donate money, and get news from the organization. The website also has informations on the different community programs available.

Website Visual Identity
The website that is currently up for Guide Dogs for the Blind is very busy and very wordy. I didn’t find it very visually interesting. I wanted to create a website that was more visually stimulating with imagery that helps the audience through the website easily. I feel website that have too much information aren’t as interesting, so I wanted to avoid that.

Design Strategy
I didn’t want my design to look cheap or 1990s by using horrendous bright colors or anything like that. I wanted to use strong visuals that the text revolves around--not vice versa. Because of this I chose strong photos that were visually interesting, as opposed to the generic ones people see over and over. I put the photo of the sad looking dog on the donate page because you want people to want to donate. Links are indicated by either orange text or being underlined. The underlined links appear in the body copy, while the orange colored links appear as navigation or headers (with orange being the default for rollovers on the navigation options). I chose orange because it complemented the tan of the background really well. I chose the combination of using a serif type face like Georgia (which looks great on the web) with a sans serif type face like Helvetica. The sans serif type is used as navigation because it is straight and direct, while the serif type face looks better as headers and body copy in the site.

Style Sheet
Navigation Headings: Helvetica Bold 14pt
Navigation Sub-headings & footer text: Helvetica Regular 12pt
Page Headings: Georgia Bold 16pt
Body Text: Georgia Regular 13pt

Document Grid
I used a 12 column grid for the website, it helped me to organize my body copy and my visuals in a clean and concise manner. I placed my navigation where I did because I wanted it to be easy to find on every page. I kept the logo on the top left to account for different monitor sizes & resolution settings.