Thoughts...

I have now produced my final designs and I'm disappointed with the amount of animation that I have produced throughout my pages. I have only been able to produce the navigation buttons in my whole four pages. I wish I had more time to add more animations. I found using Adobe Flash difficult to use in the short amount of time in which we had. If I had more time I feel I could have produced more complicated animation. This has disappointed me. I do feel the lack of animation lets down my pages. I'm happy that the buttons work as this was a worry. I have asked fellow team members and other friends that aren't on a creative course and both have said that they like the whole layout of my pages, and feel it relates to children brilliantly, however shame about the inactive side. I have to agree with the comments that I have received.

If I was to start this project again I would spend more time concentrating on the animation element of this brief. I feel that I have spent too much time researching and this has slowed my production down massively. I also spent too much time deciding on my layouts. If I had made up my mind earlier I would of had more time to refine my final website pages. I'm disappointed about that factor. 

colour schemes

I have been looking into popular colours that surround the circus. I found reds, blues and yellows are mainly used within the circus websites and posters in which I have looked at. I wanted to use these schemes within my own designs. I have used yellow for my information which stands out beautifully on my dark purple background. This was a main issue as I didn't want my text to be illegible, otherwise this would ruin the easy navigation and simplicity. 

I have tried my best to produce my clown and ringmaster in as many primary colours as possible as children will be able to relate to these easily. My target audience is my main factor surrounding the designs of my pages, I feel this has been successful. However I do feel let down that some of my colour schemes aren't as bright as I would have liked, the reasoning behind this is that I needed to think of other factors surrounding my layouts, including legibility, overall look and styling.  

Sketch Book

Target Audience

After many thoughts about my target audience will be between the ages of six and eight. So taking this into consideration I will be making the history on my pages easy to read and simple. So the child can fully understand what I'm trying to express. I won't over power the website pages with too much text, as I need my pages to be visually attractive. Whilst looking at other examples of children's websites I have noticed they use a lot of sound. I may use a book layout to make this more interesting for the user. I will be producing this on paper to see how it would look. However I will have to put this idea to my group to see if they think its a good idea or not. Because I need to make my pages fit in with the rest of my groups.

How to produce a button in flash

The first step is to insert a new symbol which can be re-named by going to the symbol properties. This is always good to do as you need to organise your buttons properly. You will need to change the button functions such as up, over, down and hit. The first frame is up which is a blank frame. To create the up button image, you can either use the drawing tools, import a graphic or place another symbol on the stage. You could use a movie clip for your button if you wanted too. The second frame is labelled over and you have to insert a key frame and this shows the image from your first frame.

Now you change the button image for the over frame and you repeat the same process for the down and hit frame. The hit frame isn't visible on playback, but it defines the area of the button that responds when clicked. You have to make sure that the hit frame graphic is a area large enough to cover all of the graphic elements of the up, down and over frames. This can also be larger than the visible button. After you have defined the images of the four button stages, you choose edit, then edit movie to exit symbol edit mode.

Open the library window by choosing window then library. You can locate the button in the library window and then drag the button symbol out of the library onto a stage. This step creates an instance button in the movie.

German, England and France Posters

Thoughts on Research

After looking into all the separate countries styles of circuses, this will enable me to produce pages that relate to the era perfectly. For example I will relate my american design to the Ringling Bros, and use an elephant to show a fact about Jumbo.

I have also decided to use a clowns face for the map on my main page, I feel this will work a lot nicer and relate to my theme perfectly. Also it will be more child friendly, as this is one of my main factors. Another factor is the colour scheme which I need to use and this will work beautifully on the clowns face. I will be stereotyping each page as this is what children will relate too and recognize. I will be using soft pastel colours for the French design and making the ringmaster on each as stereotypical as possible. I believe that this will make my designs a lot clearer to the young user.