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1) University of Nottingham When designing homepages for the University of Nottingham there are effectively two sets of constraints, the first imposed by the technical limitations of the CMS templates being used and the branding requirements of the University, and the second as defined by the customer. UoN Branding All sites were required to have the logo in the same position on the top left hand corner of the page and for the logo to be black or white. Each page also need a consistently located nav bar, footer and site name box. The designs were also required to be horizontally fluid. UoN Customer Constraints It was usual for the customer to opt for a high impact singular image or montage of images on the left had side of the page, with a ghosted background. Other thumbnnail images or news boxes were optional. Although it was more usefull to work with a single point of contact, the customer often preferred to work by committee. This always had the effect of slowing down the design process. From a University wide perspective, the design of the site was always required to market the individual school or Department to an external audience. When meeting with the customer there was often an amount of confusion concerning this. The customers often required aspects of the design to relate to key teaching or reseach areas. In this respect, designs were often compromised to be more internally focused. Another major level of constraint concerned both budget and imagery. Where customers had a design budget, imagery could be sourced from a number of locations. This included, an internal image database, external image database, CD based image collections, photo shoots and previously acquired marketing imagery. Where customers had no imagery and no budget this severely limited the design. Often in this circumstance there was a requirement to generate imagery from scratch. Examples of this are:Computer Science, Scheme, Physics and Philosophy. Sometimes, when the customer had no budget, there were enough suitable images in the CD collection to generate designs. Examples of this level of design include:Civil Engineering, Chemistry and Electric and Electronic Engineering. Where the customer had access to a photographer, these images often needed to form the basis of the design. Examples of this sort of designs include:Law, Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering, Pharmacy, Nursing and Midwifery. When customers had image budgets there was more scope to buy in professional imagery from external images databases. Examples of designs using such imagery include:the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science and Politics Often other constraints existed. This included the requirement to use a specific colour scheme (China Policy Institute), the need to reflect specific teaching areas (Community Health Sciences) and the need to reflect certain distributions of gender and race. (Nursing) 2) Non University of Nottingham Constraints The main constraint when designing Wrox.com, AspToday and WroxBase was that they had to use minimal graphics. In essence, most of the 'design' is created in the style sheet rather than relying heavily on the use of graphics. With this 'function over form' approach in mind I used similar ideas when designing the eVALUed and RBC sites. 3) No Constraints I designed and built the site at 'Kyogenix' and decided not to impose any constraints on myself. It was an experiment to see what I could come up with when not working within the normal level of constraint one would expect from a web design project
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