Design Review: The Sold Project

I’m going to preface this post with “I am not a designer”.  While working to improve my skills in this area, I do not see myself as a designer as much as I’d like to be one.  That being said, I do design every now and again when I feel that my “skills” can be useful.

This is a design review of a site I worked on a while back called The Sold Project.  Some background on that: The Sold Project is a NFP organization working towards eliminating child slavery throughout the world.  A noble undertaking indeed.   I was excited to work on this project and worked out a deal to do a refresh on their current design (which much to my surprise wasn’t that shabby to begin with).  After some initial discussions, I decided to try sketching something before I opened Photoshop.

Click on the image for a full view.

Ok, now, I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, but the task of sketching something before opening Photoshop really helped me to visualize a direction I wanted to start with, and ultimately made the progress in Photoshop move along much quicker.  Once I had a sketch that I thought might work, it was time to pick a color palette.  I like to use www.colorschemer.com for this.  I forget what this palette was called, but here it is:

With a sketch and colors in hand, I fired up Photoshop and tore into things.  This is the first comp that I came up with.

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The initial feed back from the client was good.  However they did have a few concerns. + the logo needed to be changed to a newer slightly modified version

+they now were looking at displaying some type of rotating message center with a possibility of videos displayed prominently

+ there was too much information below the fold

+ the teal color used was not in line with their branding (black and reds mostly).

Great feedback, off to revision town.

After making some tweaks, I arrived at this comp:

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I was pleasantly surprised when the client loved it.  Overall, it was a good lesson for me in regards to learning design and information architecture.  If you have some time, please visit The Sold Project sometime, and see what you can do to help end child slavery.