Second Prototype and the Right Type of Type

I've decided to make another prototype of what I would like my site to look like. This inspiration came to me while looking at a magazine called Launch A Website: A practicle guide for non-techies. This magazine is essentially an in-depth textbook that covers everything, and more, covered in my Design of Graphical User Interface class. It goes over everything from how to pick good fonts, the meanings behind color, how to do proper testing, what do to for wireframes, and how to sit down with people and figure out what needs to be made in order to meet their goals while still being practice and usable. Here is a link to their webiste if you would like to take a further look. Be warned though, this magazine is about $25 since it's British (I've read a number of Photoshop magazines that were also British, and the all tend to have a higher price tag than their American counterparts) and it's actually quite large. Really nice graphics and layout though!

Anyway, I was inspired by one of the pages. It was a simple layout with lime, grey, black, and white. I know I really wanted my site to be based on the color purple, but I kind of like this color too. It also matched really well with the default colors of the menu tutorial I found. I was also told that my last mock up was lame |D . Hopefully this one is better? The music note is where the logo / site name will go. The green squares at the top are different parts of the navigation too that I'm not 100% sure about yet.

Click to View Fullsize

Naturally, the menu would be a lot longer than this, but I didn't want to make it be too long. I'm not sure if this is too simple or not yet, but we'll have to see once  I start to actually make a real prototype. What do you think?


Additional, I have been doing some font hunting. I found some nice fonts on Google Web Fonts and Dafont that I've downloaded and hope to include. They are: Champagne and Limousines, and Averia Serif. Picking fonts is hard! It's not like picking out what to eat for dinner: a good typeface can set you apart and a lot of people judge the design of a site based on the font they use. In fact, there are a lot of people who do nothing but judge type all day. These are sad sad people, but then again, I blog about cross-dressing Asian men who sing out of tune. It's all a matter of perspective, I guess. The biggest problem, though: buying fonts is expensive. Don't believe me? Look at a type foundry. For example, this font is new and to buy the entire set of it costs $250. I've found other absolutely gorgeous fonts while taking a typography class that cost nearly twice that. Sometimes bundles of 40 or so font faces can cost $3000+, and that's just for licensing on one computer. I would find other really pretty fonts to share, but then I'm going to feel bad for not being able to use them...