Gary Bouton's Xara Stuff

[Gare]

This is a little weird sharing these designs here, but also a sense of appropriateness is in the front of my pinhead, too. I was asked several times about updating the look of Xara Xone when I was working the site. Unfortunately, the video tutorials usually took up so much of each month producing, it was going to be "either/or", and content won over new layout.

I did have a second look for Xara Xone, but never had the time to publish it; WordPress isn't as simple as clicking File>Publish Website! :)

The original paradigm was a scrapbook, and it played well with some, not so well with others. I came up with an American Supermarket paradigm for the unpublished design: we have little shops within a supermarket, each with its own identity, but a cohesive theme is needed, "all under one roof", so to speak. The Home page...



The Tutorial page is harmonious with the top page:



The Giveaway page was as far as I'd designed. Two things I wanted to accomplish were to get the sales icon links out of the margins and into the page, with a "soft sell" tag of copy with them. I also had an idea to show a different extruded shape each month for the inline advertisement for Xara 3D, or whatever it's called now:



And the section headers were finished I spent a lot of time with fonts and looking at kiosk signs in malls to get a sense of what a "little shop", a boutique would look like:



I think my limitation comes from years in visual communications. I try to put a message in graphics, and that is not a good fit for a commercial website.