Week 14: Jasuta

Design Strategy:

Girls in bathing suits – what frat boy wouldn’t want to attend Delta Gamma’s annual AnchorSplash competition? But in all seriousness, the philanthropy is aimed at both fraternity boys and sorority girls, and is hosted by the ladies of Delta Gamma.

Inspiration for the design of the web interface came directly from the Rho Chapter (Syracuse) Delta Gamma house. Decorated in pale blues with cream-colored trim and pink accents, the house is a life-sized dollhouse at 901 Walnut. Similarly, the pastels used in the interface are girly and classic, but without being overwhelmingly sweet. The use of pastel pink, blue, green, and yellow highlight the fun and exciting nature of the event. The colors are eye-appealing and fun: there is nothing boring about the interface. AnchorSplash isn’t your typical sporting-event-for-charity; it invites participants to relax, have fun, and enjoy the competition all in the name of service.

The interface is simple in its navigation. Different tabs highlight the essential aspects related to AnchorSplash, and provide fun visuals to highlight the entertaining event and encourage future participants. The external links to register or donate to Service for Sight, Delta Gamma’s national philanthropy, are found on both the first and last tabs.

The tabs on the navigation bar change color when selected to create a unified page look. When the Home tab is highlighted, the tab remains green when viewing that page. It creates a cohesive look and marks the flow of the website as the audience jumps from link to link, like bookmarking a page in a book. The Golden Anchor also appears when different tabs are selected, highlighting both the DG symbol and the tabbed page.

Choice of Typefaces:

The headline typeface is in Century, a serif, which stands apart from the rest of the sans serif text on the website. Century is feminine and sweet, but still asserts itself as a different font in the header.

The rest of the interface is designed in variations of News Gothic MT. With different sizes and weights, the sans serif is a legible and even font with medium-sized x-heights that is fun to look at and easy to read. It communicates the message of the website perfectly: simple and to the point.

Visuals:

The header includes the Greek letters Delta and Gamma making a splash – after all, the event is focused on Delta Gamma’s “Doing Good” in their community and for their philanthropy. Each paged has a different image from past AnchorSplash events. The Home and Contact pages utilize cutout figures to enhances the page, but not distract from the information. Instead, both use the images to direct the eye to the information: the home page has the DG sister doing the salute towards the text, and on the contact page the girls salute on the bench and point up towards the contact information.

Ideally, the live interface would allow the Photo Gallery page to scroll through various photos from AnchorSplash events, hence the cutoff of the next picture in the Gallery.

The Events page uses visuals to give an example of the activities and the pool play that happens at AnchorSplash. Similarly, the Delta Gamma page uses images to illustrate sisterhood at its finest.

Both text boxes and images are bound and set on boxes to make the text/image pop: white borders are used for images, blue-on-yellow boxes are used for text. All together, the use of bright pastel color and fun images are what make the interface.