Capstone — Professional Review pt. 2!

This post is part five of a project documentation series starting with the post: What is Capstone? That post will give you a lot of context on this project and the series. Through these posts, I will be documenting the process of my Senior Year Capstone course.

After reaching out to some talented designers, I came to the conclusion of having the wonderful Sydney Michuda as my mentor/reviewer for this project. She has met with me a few times and given me great feedback on my designs. This post is a conclusion of my second meeting with her, but if you want to learn more about her and hear about our first meeting, I’d recommend reading my previous post here.

Here is an overview of my second meeting with Sydney and her review of my project.

A few suggestions that Sydney gave me were:

• Minimize the size of the navigation
• Rearrange the logo to make it fit the navigation better
• Center the wording on a section
• Add a shop now button in the merch section
• rearrange sections to have a hierarchy of importance
• Add icons above each topic in the “Why we’re passionate” section
• Regarding the lighting illustration, make all of the lines a similar weight and fix some of the perspectives
• Fix hierarchies on the product pages
• Change the background color of the navigation

What I will adjust:

Of all of these suggestions, the most helpful ones were fixing the hierarchal issues, adding the shop now button, minimizing the navigation size, and adding icons. Based on all of her suggestions, I will be making adjustments to all of these elements and also going through the rest of the site to make sure everything is cohesive, professional, and clear.

This experience compared to the first:

Compared to my first interaction, this one was a lot smoother, more comfortable, and quicker. She seemed more comfortable listing off her suggestions and I felt more comfortable receiving them.

To improve the process, I went in with more preparation of what I wanted feedback on. I had some questions ready, but also just specific topics or sections I wanted her overall feedback on even if it wasn’t a specific question. Overall, Sydney was super helpful, kind, and encouraging over the past few meetings and has really challenged me as a designer!