This website is a portfolio website of the photography Jeremy Cowart. On the home page, there are six main navigation links that are broad, yet clear. Since a secondary navigation system is not in place, the site does not have a deep architecture. With a site that has a very flat architecture, there is no hierarchy needed. Given that there are so many projects that he has completed, in my opinion, the site was designed this way so that visitors can see the best of each category (Music, TV/Film, Celebrity, World, Life, and Advertising) rather than several samples of each project. If he was to include several photos for each subcategory, the website would have incorporated too many photos, making it hard for users to navigate the pages and appreciate Cowart’s work.
The six main links remain in the same place throughout the website upon leaving the home page, and are made clear that they are links by having it in a column on the left side of the site. When you click on one of the navigation links, it allows the user to see where they are in the website by having a selected state – the text becomes white with a blue strikethrough. The navigation system is not the only element that stays consistent; the structure of the pages does so, also. There are no sections that change. This is due to the fact that this is a website that does not present much information; it lets the photos speak for themselves.
Once you leave the home page by clicking on a main link, you cannot go back unless you refresh the page. Since you can access everything on the home page once you leave it (being only the navigation links), it is not a huge problem. For those who would like to go back to the main page and appreciate the artistic view, however, this may be a problem and takes a few seconds to realize that there is only one way to get back to the home page – by refreshing the page.
Since this website is mainly to showcase photos, the pages are largely filled with photos rather than text. In pages where there is the need to present information through words, such as the “About” and “Contact” pages, there is a clear hierarchy in the typography. One way to improve the typography would be to increase the leading because the lines of text seem to sit very close to each other. Doing so would make the presentation of the information more pleasant to the eyes. Currently, the hierarchy of the typography is controlled only by the color, size, and weight of the text, and incorporating some small spacing elements would make the information more logical and aesthetically pleasing.
There is a great deal of consistency on this website. To make the task of browsing photos seem less tedious/frustrating (the usability factor is low for navigating through photos, which I will address later), the structure of the pages stay consistent throughout. The focal point of each page is the first photo, which is defaulted to be in its selected state, in color (the unselected state being smaller in size and with a black and white overlay). This is the first item that grabs your attention on the page because of the contrast in color with the background, which is dominated by shades of black and white to separate content on the page through shaded boxes. Since the website is not as lively in terms of its color palette, the photos definitely add to the design of the website. These colors were chosen so as to not detract attention from the photos, which is the main attraction to the website. I could always go for more or less photos; it all has to do with whether they will complement Cowart’s portfolio as a whole or not.
There is some iconography used in this website which gave you a vague idea of what it was, but was not too obvious. There is one that allows the user to expand the window of the website, and one to show thumbnails of pictures, which were pretty easy to understand. A keyboard icon sits below after the six navigation links on the left-hand side of the page. It seems pretty clear after you find out that it gives a list of keyboard shortcuts to browse through the site. This was not obvious off the bat, however, since keyboard shortcuts are rarely defined within a website.
The purpose of this website is to exhibit the works of photographer Jeremy Cowart and sell his artistic abilities. There is no search feature on this website, but I find the feature of panning out to see thumbnails of photos very useful, since you can only see 3 photos at a time in the expanded view. This can be frustrating when you don’t want to click every single time you want to see one more photo. They could improve it by adding a double-arrow button (much like the fast forward button), which allows visitors to see the next set of three photos rather than just generating one new photo upon clicking. They could also improve it by including thumbnails on the bottom of the expanded photos so that one does not need to go to a new page to see the thumbnails. It would be convenient for users to see the expanded photos and the thumbnails of other photos at the same time rather than having to jump from one page to another.
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