Oscar Godson’s Blog

I decided to do my own website for this before and after because it has gone through a major transformation. I gave up on updating any of my personal website after I started school because I had no time at all. Now with making my site as a requirement I'm going to take it further than I did before.

 I am currently in the process of programming and coding it, but the design is done. I wanted to do a design I personally have never seen anywhere else and make it as original as I can. It was hard not to take the influence of other websites I liked and truly coming up with my own design that was branded with my business card and logo.

There is a footer you can not see, but it will be visible on oscargodson.com soon. This is displaying in Firefox 3 Beta 5 for Mac OS X.

This before and after is my biggest one yet. I took one of my first projects and hopefully made it not look like a first year project anymore. I don't think I need to tell you which one was my first year project and the latest version.

I wanted to try to stay on the same color scheme and I kept all the main elements. I personally love how the rocket came out. I was going to make a T-Shirt with that rocket on it for my portfolio site.

BeforeRockett

AfterRocket

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Here is my before and after for my Mercy Corps book that was published on lulu.com. My only suggestions that seemed to be repeated, which I fixed (hopefully) were:

• The band is too high and is covering her hands
• The words are not centered
• The band is in a weird spot barely touching her chin

NOTE: These were screen shots in InDesign and that's why the logo looks all pixelated. As a PDF it is not.

Before
With my first project I wanted to do something simple to get the hang of this Vox thing. The first piece I'm going to fix up is this table card for Camas Farmer's Market in Camas, WA. I need to fix the time and I need to try out some color as someone suggested. Color was the only thing somebody suggested other then the time and more applications of Camas Farmer's Market material.

Camas Farmer's Market Before

After
After screwing around with this ad for far too many hours (I had only estimated an hour or two max for this and it went way over) I got it to end up looking a lot better in my opinion. I think it's more of what the client originally wanted. I took someones suggestion from class also and added a little more color.

Too bad I didn't have enough time to make it look like this originally.

Anyways, a list of changes I made and I would love your opinion on those changes are:

Background: I wanted it not to feel so flat. It had texture, but no depth at all. I wanted it to have it lighted in the middle to take your focus off  the bottom URL which has a green background.

Leaf: I amped the the colors a little to make it a little more vibrant.

URL: Added the green background and made the URL a little more legible. With it all lowercase I felt it was long and unfriendly. The green background gave me a headache because it always made the ad super bottom heavy. After playing with the main background, rounding the corners and making it fairly small I think I have it so that it doesn't make you drop your eyes right to the bottom. I actually had three different people look at it, by having the lid shut, opening it and watching their eyes and asking them what the first thing they read was. Thankfully, they said they read the headline and read down first.

Misc: Added a light shadow to all the copy to make it more legible and changed "5:00 - 9:00pm" to "5 - 9pm"

Camas Farmer's Market Table Card After

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I thought I would put up my bio from Workshed.com that way you could get to know me from another point of view than in class.

Junior Developer
Taste Tester

"I taught myself to make web sites by making the worst web site. Ever."

Let's get straight to the point. We're pretty sure Oscar was abducted by scientists at an early age and had bionic super DNA embedded into his brain. We know this to be true, because there is no way a 17-year-old kid could be as accomplished as he is.

If you ask Oscar, he'll get an embarrassed smile on his face and tell you about how he got tired of high school, so he dropped out at 16, got his GED and started college at the age of 17. And then, that's when the startling admissions come out. Oscar created the worst web page ever to help promote the videos he and his friend were making and posting on YouTube. Scrolling marquees, blinking elements, errors everywhere, and messy, redundant code. The whole disaster.

Oscar took it upon himself to right these wrongs and engrossed himself in learning all he could about XHTML and CSS validation, web standards and how to make a cool web site without all of the gimmicky trappings of scrolling marquees and blinking text.

At Workshed, Oscar is our go-to guy for what we call “slicing,” which is the process of taking a web site mockup from Photoshop and converting it to beautiful, valid, clean XHTML and CSS code.  Even his video skills have come in handy for our video department from time-to-time. Yes, it would appear he has redeemed himself. Just don't let him know that we all made the same mistake as he did when we started out. He might start to think he's normal—and that would be a waste of perfectly good bionic super DNA.

In his spare time, Oscar spends more time on the web, hangs out with his girlfriend and family, plays drums and has fun with kinetic type.