Critique my Screen Design

[Decko87]

Okay so I'm a sophomore web design student at a local art school. I'm looking for feed back on this initial screen design, it's just a picture and has no functionality. This is actually going to be the first working website I make for my studies.

Heres a very brief description of what it is: In class we sort of put our ideas for web sites into a hat and had to pick one to make, my topic was "Wildlife Conservation" so I'm doing my best to adhere to the theme. The color design is close to split triadic. The background features various yellow, the containers and sub highlight color is brown, and the main highlight color is green.

The assignment was to make a basic homepage layout, this will undergo edits before the other pages are created.

I'm not very good with the pen tool yet, so the one drawing in the center of the page will improve.

** I ask you to critique me as a professional because these are the standards I will be held to the rest of my life, so disregarding the fact that I'm a student, what would you think?**

A preemptive thanks to anyone who responds!

 

[Absentee]

Less italic fonts. Italics should be used to emphasize something specific, not for EVERYTHING that isnt a sentence (seriously, everything shorter than 5 words on your page is italic)
Use a max of 2 different font families, with only slight variations in styling of the fonts (size, weight, etc)

The dividers between the different tabs at the top look a little weird. Play around with those, try making em thinner, maybe not have them span the entire height of the tabs?

The small list at the left (under Welcome): Make the '-' hang to the left of the items, not indenting them, this lines up the start of each list item, and makes it more clear where each item starts. Consider changing the '-' to actual bullets also

The biggest 2 changes are italics and playing with font choices. I'd keep a standard font (like times, arial, etc, up to you really) for the body type that would be changed or updated on the website. Then use a font of your choice that compliments it in the portions that would be images, such as the header and tabs.

 

[Decko87]

Thanks man, I do agree with you about the typography... I wasn't paying too close attention I guess! You're very right about the italics, also I'm going to and a login/register in the top corner. I was just some what pleased with how this turned out considering all of my designs thus far have been next to crap. I'm just trying to figure out where to go from here! If you have any other ideas that come through your head let me know. Thanks again.

 

[knothead34]

not a bad start though. a few changes and it could look nice.

 

[madFive]

Good points from 4b5eN - fonts need a little cleanup; I would also tighten the kerning on those bullet-point items on the left so they stick together in more solid blocks, and give just a hair more space between the blocks. Currently, it looks like each line might be a separate link.

My biggest issue here is with the lack of contrast in the colors, mostly how close your green tone is to the yellow background. One general rule you'll learn a little farther into typography is that colored fonts are almost always frowned on - I'd try and stick with black or white whenever possible. If you have to use color in your fonts, make sure it has extremely high contrast from the background color to maximize readability.

I think my color solution here would be to lighten up your green text a little (maybe add a little more blue to the hue to separate it from the yellow). The yellows and browns in the background should be darkened a good bit, and I would try and make the shifts from yellow to brown a little more analogous. Currently between the 2 yellow gradients and browns you have 5 or 6 hues total going there; I'd bring those in to 2-3 hues (yellows and browns) total with a little less variation in value.