Tracking madness… early May edition.
EditorialsAuthor: James Disney
Hello world,
How’ve you been? Good to see you back here, reading what I have to write. So, where we last left off, our rag tag bunch of hack designers (read: Me and Drew) were tossing some ideas around about where things will go moving on into the future. A few decisions were made. I ate a Snickers bar. Something something In ‘n’ Out, bacon, something something. Oh yeah! I remember now. Let’s take a look at what’s happened since we last spoke!
So when I last left all of you back in late March, I had been evaluating some things. Mostly some look and feel enhancements for the site. (Someone really should come up with a better term than “look and feel”… I mean, you can’t really “feel” a website, can you? I mean, unless you’re blind… but how would the pictures work? Maybe like magnets… freakin’ miracles.)
Sneaky peeky 1
So generally speaking, most of our development discussion is purely insane. For every legitimate suggestion, 15 are pure lunacy. We’ll suggest various color combos, sort through logo ideas, discuss who to ban (kidding, kidding! Those days are long gone…). But all sorts of boredom can ensue when you’re only really discussing the way a certain font looks on top of a different looking background. It seems silly, it seems excessive… but when it all comes down to it, we really are very serious about the quality of the site. Think of it in the same mindset of the saying “Dress for the job you want.” If we wanted to give the site 50%, we could crank something out in an afternoon and be happy with it. But we definitely take a lot of pride in the way the site looks and its ease of navigation and readability for you, the users.
Sneaky peeky 2
Once a few examples are found, I’ll post some ideas of stuff that the guys can consider when throwing the logo together. I’m not entirely keen on these specific images, but they convey a good idea of the background colors that we should be using. This all plays into one of the ideas I’ve really been excited about when it comes to the upcoming site tweak. If everything works as planned, you’ll have several different looks and feels to choose from! Instead of Andrew and I making a decision at some point where we throw the darts at the dart board to choose a color scheme for the site, why not give you a few different choices? While I’m not 100% confident that this idea will work as planned, if we can, we will make it happen! Kinda cool, huh?
Sneaky peeky 3
One idea I had was to use photos. We have some of the best photographers on the internet when it comes to theme park photography, why not use some of their talents? Again, it’s an idea that might not see the light of day, but you never know. Stranger things have happened. Most famously, Westcoaster 6 had a very stylized version of a few photos that we’d taken over the years. This idea was to take the photo and maybe dress it up a little. Oddly, as fun as some of the tweaks were, Albert wisely pointed out that the original photo was actually perfect as is. An awesome shot by Luke that was taken during the fireworks show at Hong Kong Disneyland.
Sneaky peeky 4
And then, we have the inevitable tests… Andrew starts coming back with logo ideas. Generally speaking, the background itself won’t survive, but the text? The general consensus is that we love the “W”, the rest of the text… maybe not so much. I don’t know just yet. Again, keeping in mind that this is simply the first go at a logo of any sort. The new idea is that the “logo” itself is the text that floats over the background images. So we can float a logo text with the site’s title (or whatever we end up choosing, I ended up sending several test slogans off to Dan and Drew the other night) over pretty much any background we choose. Fun, huh?
Sneaky peeky 5
And a second logo test… sort of goes back to a Westcoaster 2 look. There’s a lot that I like about it… who knows. But one thing that will stay pretty solid is the general look and feel of the logo to be unified through the whole site. We’re still in the early stages of the planning, but generally speaking, with us we’ll go from zero to a million dang near overnight.
Sneaky peeky 6
And how about the boards? Well, they’re already in test and tweak mode as well! There’s still a lot to do here, but I am hugely pleased with how they’re turning out. Many of the features I’d envisioned for them are fleshing out pretty well. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s generally positive stuff. I think you’ll be pleased with the outcome!
We’ve still got some fun stuff up our sleeves for the coming weeks and months. Some cool tweaks and changes… and some additions too! It’s going to be a fun ride! 10 years into it and we’re still expanding, growing and changing. This has been a fun hobby so far, and I’m just glad that all of you have been along for the journey with us!
Have any questions or suggestions about the site? Please shoot them over by using our Formspring account: http://www.formspring.me/westcoaster
Thanks for reading!
-Jim