Thesis: Simple wireframes

It took a bit, but I’ve finally gotten my site architecture down and some simple wireframes done up. I even did a first draft at a design but I didn’t like it because it was too obvious. I’m still thinking of how to turn a “patriotic” design into less of a flag-waving bonanza (I keep imagining I’ll have to do a ‘Don’t shoot! I’m a patriot!’ kind of song and dance when this is live if McCain wins).

But I’m still optimistic, so I’m going to try for more of a classy, minimalist look. Not that the US Patriotic look isn’t classy, but it adds too much of a message that is sometimes directly challenged by the site materials. Not in an aggressive way, but definitely challenged.

The better thing yet is that by doing these wireframes I’ve got a solid sense of how I want the flash elements within the site to work. Knowing that is half the battle, the rest is just ironing out the logic of the code. My next steps in all of this are to work these up into a couple more design executions as comps and then settle on the one that I’m going to go with. Then it’s time to take the placeholder graphics I’ve got and use them to build the code base for the flash interactivity. Once the code and interaction is working I’ll populate it with the “real” graphics later, but why wrestle with all of those images when you can just as easily make shortcut graphics to get the code banged out with.

Here’s the pages for the wireframes.

Home page, with below the fold flash element

Timeline wireframe with flash notes

Who

Red - Articles about Native American POV

White - Articles about Manifest Destiny

Blue - Hope for the future

Bibliography styling