Sketching out a Creative Portfolio Website

In order to start the website creation module of the class, I started by trying to create a logo/choose a name to go on my site. It seems simple, but sometimes life is complicated.

My "sketching process" for this module has been to "try stuff". This has led to many joys and frustrations, and ultimately, a trip down the wormhole of text animation. 

Here are what I have worked on so far in order to hopefully end up with something I like next week. I started off thinking it needed to be fancy.

I watched this logo creation/watermark youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPuoh29Kqa0

You know I love the gold, but I really don't like the "C" shape in this font. I did edit the individual letters in may ways, but I moved on after trying several different effects.  I was looking for both a watermark logo for my photos as well as a logo for the website.

 
 
 
 
I went looking for more fonts (dafont.com) and found this one. Ruth is my middle name and I've always liked the idea of dropping my last name if I ever published a book.
 

 
This font is my favorite so far! I edited several of the letters, connecting some, separating others, to make it truly my own. I need to make a tag-line but once I found the font I got side tracked with manipulating the text. 
 
I tried to make it "sparkler" text below. 
Here is the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGzcSUKPhlA 
It's a fail for the logo, win for learning the technique. Just the idea of creating brushstrokes out of portions of images was worth it! I think if I would have chosen larger portions of the sparkler image and a better image than was used in the tutorial, I could have gotten the effect I was looking for. 



And lastly, here is the first draft of the masthead. I know I will be changing the colors and have a few other ideas in mind. This is also step 1 in my process: Do something I like, then I consider the "customer" and tone down my weirdness a bit. (Or kick it up a notch, whatever the case may be.) I'm also (like many people) trying to figure out my focus right now. I want the site, itself, to be a work of art.

I'm not worried about the placement of the "links" at this point, my goal is for this to be interactive but we will see if I run out of time ;-)

As far as design, I am leaning toward a one-page splash with roll-over the text and get an image in addition to a link to the details page. 

Here are the sketches and my first mach-up. 




Masthead

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