Angelssin design
Designing inspiration
Wolves Anime Club
The brief
Wolves Anime Club is a society at the University of Wolverhampton and was created in order for fans of Japanese animation and culture to gather, make friends, and have fun. The club had been run for 5 years and the new chairman of the club asked me to give it a new look.
Front end design
The first thing I did was look for a suitable logo or image I could use throughout the site that would be instantly recognisable. I noticed a logo from an anime called Soul Eater which suited the look I wanted perfectly. The only thing I did to the design of the logo was change its colour scheme because I wasn’t keen on the yellow look it had, and the fact that the clubs previous website had a yellow colour scheme, I thought it’d be best to steer as far away from that as possible. That’s when I came up with black, red and white. The colours work well with the logo and website as a whole as they are quite bold and different from one another, as well as being pretty much as far away from the previous sites design as it can get.
Front end gallery
The forum
A message board/ forum was needed to replace the clubs old one which was also a bit dated and very restrictive in terms of what the admin could do. I’ve had previous experience installing and maintaining a PHPBB forum before, so I decided to use that for the clubs forum.
As for the design of it, I used a theme and edited it to match the website. I could have started my own theme from scratch but the club needed the forum up and running as soon as possible.
Once up, the forum has since been very well maintained by the staff of the club due to its ease of use. A year on and the club now has about registered members and over 2000 forum posts which is pretty impressive for a small society.
Forum gallery
The back end
One of the main things the chairman wanted was for the site to be easy to update as previous versions of the clubs site were done in pure HTML and had to be edited in the code if there were any updates.
I decided on using WordPress to power the website and enable the utmost ease of editing and updating information. Every page on the website is editable and I even found a plugin for the sidebar which allows the club to schedule for events with a countdown timer. This is exactly what the club needed and updating their site is now just like blogging, it couldn’t be simpler.
Back end gallery
Experimental
These are things I will work on to improve myself as a web designer in areas that don't really focus on the web. Work such as Photoshop pieces, sketches and rough designs will go here.