Subcreation
Year
2022 - Work in Progress
2022 - Work in Progress
Role
Web Design, Graphic Design
Web Design, Graphic Design
The Subcreation team reached out to me through the Liquid Women in Warcraft Discord server and I was excited to work on something that I use all of the time, as a cutting edge WoW gamer. The website pulls data from other websites like WarcraftLogs and Raiderio to populate tier lists and builds and is popular among competitive WoW gamers to view builds most people are running.
All World of Warcraft images copyright of Blizzard Entertainment.
Original Website
The primary focus to my approach on exploring the visual identity and structure of the website was to make it accessible and easy to understand for all users, not just hardcore competitive gamers who are familiar with the site. I took a look at the navigation and general layout of the website in its current iteration. By understanding the user flow, through my own personal experience and physically taking note of how someone would try and find a build, I restructured the website slightly for users to navigate easier. Below are screenshots of the current website and a formal site map I created to reference when designing the layouts.
With Subcreation, I wanted to keep it simple since at its core, it's a data aggregation website. I chose a primarily grayscale color scheme with accents of World of Warcraft's item rarity system: Legendary (orange), Epic (purple), Rare (blue), and Uncommon (green). This allows us to highlight elements when needed.
To make sure colors are accessible, I contrast checked the background color and text colors. The gray text and dark gray background color combination passes at 7.19 contrast ratio for all normal text, large text, and graphical objects and user interface components.
Previous explorations included using Source Sans Pro as the main typeface to give the data feel but we felt that Inter increases legibility across the board. Figuring out the homepage layout to get users where they need to go was the biggest challenge. I explored a simple redesign to designing a side bar navigation. Ultimately, I decided to go back to the top navigation since it would be less jarring for those who are familiar with the website.
I had an idea before Subcreation for a fun "Which specialization would you be?" type of website where it used large text and buttons so I pulled that idea here since the idea was to be clear and concise to the user. In an effort to clear, I added a checkmark to elements on the homepage to indicate to the user that they can continue forward.
Some intentional design decisions we made include focusing on a dark theme first for gamers because the creator originally had the website in a lighter color theme but constantly received feedback for a darker color theme. We also decided to move the summary of the website to the footer since most people coming to the website want to get to their context quickly and we felt that was the best move forward.
Below is a rough prototype of the new homepage's functionality to decrease the amount of clicks for users to get to the content they need. There will be more to come!