My school has entered me in the griffith digital design challenge for the second year running. Last year I came third out of my country in web design in the competition. The rules of the competition are as following: 1. You arrive at your school with whatever equipment you want to bring along to compliment what they already have. 2. You are e-mailed a brief at 9.15am. 3. You have until 12.15pm to finish it. Pretty easy, but I'd like some suggestions -- last year I was beaten by someone who used a template to play around with. Entirely legal given the rules of the competition. Should I have a go with something too? And should I go for entirely cliche Web 2.0 stuff or more traditional corporate website design? It is a design school, so maybe they'll appreciate a more modern approach.
i suggest you get an template then play around with it, becuase that way your wasting time on the acual base coding which is hell. good luck
Well, I didn't end up doing the template thing, but I didn't do too badly either: http://www.mediahug.com/designchallenge2006 NOTE: DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY ON WIDESCREEN OR MOST RES's OVER 1024x768. This is an issue I didn't realise at the time because I was working on a 1024x768 res screen. Given a few more hours to play around with it I would've recognised and fixed the sizing problem.
Take along plenty of css material, after all you're going to save yourself a lot of time if you can use a stylesheet in terms of coding. I would also take along as many handy little scripts as you can fit on a CD, if you are allowed. It'll save you time searching for an image gallery or whatever should the brief require you to use one. Finally, get some inspiration for design before you go. When I'm constructing sites, I spend more time on the design than I do coding the subsequent 20 pages, so the less time you spend playing around with how it'll look, the more time you have to check functionality, usability, how well it flows, resolution resizing problems etc.