The Finished Piece

To view the finished piece follow the link!

CLICK HERE!!

Enjoy

Development of a page

I wanted to show the development of one of the pages:
This was the starting point - with a light gradient background and black text.
To continue developing this page the background was changed to go with the theme of Halloween/autumn. Also, at this point the border was being considered.
The completed piece has had the background changed one of the photos I took. Also, the website layout has been added and the buttons sorted out so that it has a more completed look.

Another re-design

 I have re-designed the layout of the page again. This time I have made it look more like a webpage - by adding a title that will be there on every page and by adding a better more defined boundery. The border just wasn't right.

Another bit of aditional design that I've done is too change the choice buttons so that they stand out.

Buttons

When designing the page layout I am happy with most of it, but I feel that the choices sections aren't as clear as they should be. By this I mean that they should stand out and be recognised as links rather then just more text. As I am creating the pages on illustrator it wouldn't be possible for me to make the words change colour as you would if it were created in Dreamweaver. So I have looked at various ways that I could create a 'button' look.

Re-design

Having recieved feedback from my dynamic word group I have decided to make a few changes to the design of the page. On of the issues that came up a couple of times was that the background could use some work. Looking at it now I agree and in sorting this issue out I have looked at a few options for what I could use as a background instead. Some suggested using patterns so that's the first thing I looked at:

 

In this instance I have kept the gradient background and added a print over the top. I don't think it improves it - if anything it makes it look more complicated.

During the autumn season I tend to take a lot of photographs of the changing leaves. This year I took a few that were out of focus so that all you could see where the colours of nature. I dug these out and tested one of them out as a background. Given that this piece has a Halloween theme - which is in autumn I thought the photos would go well with it. I really liked the outcome and decided to continue using the photos as backgrounds.

Designing the Witch character

I had drawings and ideas to work from for the witch it was just a case of how to colour her. I decided I would rather do this digitally to go with the rest of the design.
To start with I looked at the outline of the witch:

I've only shown three of the options I looked at because most of them were rubbish. The only one I really liked was the 1pt Round stroke which was the one that I drew with in the first place. So I went with that.
Next was what colour her clothes should be:

I felt that the purple was the most effective and stood out against the rest of them. Finally I coloured the rest of her in and added a bit of texture and shadow to try and make it look a bit more dynamic and not so flat.

The finished look is how she will be portrayed in other pages, but in different poses etc... 

After deciding on the colour of her clothes it was just down to filling in the rest of her and adding some tone so that the image didn't look so flat.

Designs

In the 'choose your own adventure' type books there is a typical layout that all of them use to display the information. As can be seen below this is the basic layout of most, if not all CYOA books. This is fine within books and with the added illustrations is a little more interesting, but has worked for many years.

I'm considering using a similar format for mine, but changing the paragraph alignment and where these 'pieces' are placed to make it more visually interesting for the viewer/reader. Due to this being done for the internet the ability to use colour is there, which for most books would not happen.