M2 (4/6) Produce a blog entry that describes the main design tools that you have used

M2: Describe the main design tools that you have used in the creation of website

Introduction

In the creation of my website I used a wide range of tools and every tool that I used was very important in order successfully create my website. For this reason, this document is going to be set within the parameters of going through the tools that I used and describing the purpose of them and how and where it was useful in the development of the website. The tools that are going to be explained include: QSEE Superlite, Colour Pallete, Fonts, Wireframe and the graphic programme Adobe Illustrator.

QSEE Superlite

QSEE superlite can defined as a software application that is packaged with sub-tools that help with the design and analysis of computer type systems that are being developed or enhanced. It includes range of ‘defacto’ standard models that are used in many different industries as tools essential in the creation of systems. The support techniques provided in QSEE Superlite includes entity-relationship diagram, decision tree and flow charts. The support technique that I used from QSEE Superlite was a decision tree. The purpose of the decision tree was to help with the creation of a site map. This site map is what allowed me to know the navigation within my webpage was going to be. The site map was very important to the success of the website because it is what allowed me to know the type of content that was going to in each webpage, the amount of webpages and the links between the webpages. (Stafford 2015)    

Colour Pallete

The colour pallete tool that was used in the creation of the website was Adobe Kuler. The purpose of Adobe Kuler is to help you find the perfect combination of colours. It allows you to try and create and save colour schemes that has been created within the colour scheme. (Wikipedia 2015) The purpose of using Adobe Kuler as a tool in the creation of my website is to find out the colour scheme that I was going to use throughout my whole site. Also using Adobe Kuler as a tool helped me with defining colours when I was developing the CSS for each webpage as the software application gives you the CSS reference for each colour. A major advantage that Adobe Kuler brought to me is that it allowed to experiment with colour themes that I was a bit sceptic with. I decided to change my colour scheme because when I created it in Adobe Kuler I saw that contrast was low between the original colour scheme that I wanted to use. For this reason, I decided to use highly contrasting colour that was evident in Adobe Kuler which was red, black and white throughout the website.

Fonts

The tool that I used to pick the font that I wanted to use in my website was Google Web Fonts. Google Web Fonts are fonts that are released uder open source licences thus, why they are allowed to be used for non-commercial and commercial assignments. The reason why I used Google Web Fonts is because it gave me access to a wide range of fonts and at the same time preview the fonts in different sizes and font-weight. The major advantage that I gained from using the font developer is that it offered the CSS coding for each font which was needed for the text content on website. Also Google fonts makes it easy to integrate fonts with Javascript and CSS as the scripting for the font is available for copying and pasting directly into the HTML source code for the site or the style sheet.

Cacoo Wireframe

Wireframe in terms of website creating is setting out the layout of context and the structure of the site that is to be created. Cacoo is a tool that can be used to make diagram, wireframes and network charts. The advantage that Cacoo brought to me in the design stage of my website was that it had standard website layout templates and this made it easy for me develop my designs as I knew the standard webpage structure that my site had to follow.

Graphic Programme

The graphic programme that was used as a tool in the creation of my website was Adobe Illustrator. This tool is a vector based graphic software application. The purpose of this software tool is to create vector based graphics that are normally used as logo or printed as hardcopy on materials. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the logo that is present on every page on the site. The reason why Adobe Illustrator is important as a tool used for reating the logo is becuause it is vector based which means that scaling the logo wouldn’t affect the quality of the image as it would be rasterized images. This is essential as on webpages users might decided to zoom in and if the logo starts to pixelate as the client users zoom into the webpage it will have a detrimental effect on the professionalism of the overall website.