About Our Group
- Jasmine Bennett
- David Haslem
- Evan Martin
- Mary Rohletter
- Kristen Stansell
Group Review
For our review, we talked about seeing Cirque du Soleil. The guys in our group went into the show not expecting much more than a typical circus performance, having never heard anything about Cirque du Soleil. The girls were a lot more excited, since they had heard quite a bit about Cirque before.
We enjoyed the performance a great deal. It exceeded our expectations, which is surprising, considering how much the girls were looking forward to it.
1. Page Concept
We are planning on using font and text that will draw people to want to look further into attending the Cirque performance. We want to use a fun but elegant font because we feel this describes Cirque best. The color, as well, needs to be something bright and colorful but not too childish.
We want to give the impression of a fun, circus-like environment but also much more serious and talented performance. This is a challenging thing for us to do because of the division between males and females in our group. With different things during the performance affecting the men differently from the women, causes our thoughts and opinions towards what is best for the website to differ.
The boys will want to focus more on the ideas that they liked, while the girls want to focus on what they enjoyed most. This is also a good thing, though, because this will help us to attract people from both sexes and won’t be appealing to just one group of people. Cirque, for us, was a great experience, and we want to do everything in our power to influence others to attend the performance.
2. Execution
Executing the perfect font and color is very important. We want to make sure the most important ideas are in bigger font and less important ideas in smaller font.
We are all working together and deciding on the perfect ideas. We will each pick out different ideas that we like individually, and we will then decide and debate on which will be best until we have narrowed the text and font color down to our favorite choices.
3. Plan of Action
Our plan of action is for each person to individually pick out font and color on their own, and our goal is for each one of us to pick five choices. We will then lay down each of our choices and begin to narrow down and discuss each one. As we go through this process, we will begin to eliminate the ones that we do not all agree will be best represented on the website.
As we narrow these down, we will begin to make examples on posters and large examples to show the class. While discussing what we would like to use on our website, we are looking for ideas that will draw attention to the website and to the program as a whole. We want the viewer to become engaged in the website and for their desire to see the show to grow stronger.
Evan and David will help us a lot to narrow down our ideas to things much less “girly,” and Jasmine, Mary and Kristen can make sure that the designs and colors are still very attractive to the eye. We thoroughly enjoyed Cirque’s performance, and we want to do all we can and encourage others to enjoy the same experience we enjoyed.
4. Design Aspects
We like the look of light text on dark backgrounds accompanied by a lot of bright accent colors. The reason for this approach is to try to match the page and website to the actual performance inside the circus tent. When we went to the performance, it was in a pitch dark setting but what brought the light to the stage were the colors of the costumes and props on stage. So in our proposition, the black background of our website will play the role of the circus tent and the text and pictures will be the performers dressed in bright colors.
Font choices will need to be based mostly on standard web fonts. The body will be a standard sans-serif font. We would like to include headers with more styled text, for which we will need to create images. These headers would be large, brightly colored and in a serif font.
To add contrast to the page, we will use a italicized serif font for the accent text. This difference in the shape of the letters will make the words stand out more than a difference in color alone would give us, and also makes for a more visually interesting and diverse looking page, font wise.
5.1 Sources of Inspiration
The official website for Cirque Du Soleil is a prime example of how we would have the font and colors for our website. The only difference we would make was that there wasn’t so much text. We want to make the website as easy as possible to navigate and we want to get the important points across and quick.
5.2 Other Groups
Our group has the skills to pull off a complete website for this project. However, we definitely could use the cooperation of other groups to make our website more effective. First, working with the images group would be useful for creating fancy headers.
We could also use the work of the navigation group to help organize our website efficiently. We have a general idea of how we'd like to make the navigation work, but working with them would save us the effort of having to make it work.
6. Group dynamics
Our group worked really well together, but we did have challenges. We didn't have as many group meetings as we could have, mainly because of scheduling conflicts. This didn't have a horrible effect on our ability to work together, since we were able to coordinate through email and in-class meetings.
We found working with everyone's strengths helped make our group work better. For example, Jasmine's ability to present was very useful for our presentation and David's capability for web design helped bring everything together.
7. Technical Skills
Overall, our team does possess the technical skills necessary to complete our plan of action. First, David has experience designing websites and can handle the basic configurations and structuring of the website. With his knowledge of how websites work and how to create them David is also our technical support. When one of us encounters a problem David almost always has the solution.
The other members of our team are all very technically capable as well. Computing has become one of the most important aspects in each of our lives, giving us all the skills we need to carry out our plan of action. Mary and Jasmine have experience uploading images to the computer and to the internet, and they are skilled in formatting the size, position, and overall appearance of these images to create a good balance between organization and creativity. They also make the website attractive through their designs in color schemes and font types. Kristen is very creative in terms of the overall organization of the website, and is able to make the website flow evenly from one topic to another.
Finally, although all of the team members are efficient at typing, Evan is remains our team’s main typist. Evan can type out data at a very fast pace, decreasing the time spent on the tedious aspects of the website creation so more time and energy can be focused on the creative aspects. Thus, with the combination of all of our skills our team can perform our task without outside help. Each team member contributes their skills and knowledge to create an organized, creative, structurally sound, and user-friendly website.
8. Other Groups
After viewing the presentations of others, our group did make slight adjustments to our ideas and concepts. We had at first thought to only have Evan and Jasmine speak, but the other groups included more speakers and seemed very organization in their topics of discussion. Also, our group decided to spend more time on the preparation and organization of our presentation.
We gave each team member a specific topic to share with the class and structured the presentation to flow evenly from member to member. The presentations we watched on the basketball game and the show at the fox also seemed very well-rehearsed, so our team rehearsed our presentation all the way through to make sure we knew that we were prepared to present.
9. Working Together...
One thing that we could have done to work better as a group was to find out what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were before we started working and assigning jobs to each person.
One thing that would have helped a lot was to know that David was very advanced in creating web pages, so right from the get go we could have let him handle all of the technical stuff with the web page. So when we found this out about David that allowed the rest of us to focus more on the context of the website—we were each able to express how the Cirque du Soleil affected us and how we felt about the experience and let David worry about the HTML.
10. What we've learned
We have learned that in group related assignments things have to flow throughout the people in the group. For a group project or presentation to work and sound its best, everything needs to have a nice flow to it. It does not sound good in group presentations when group members repeat what one another says. Also, it does not sound good when group members interrupt one another to speak their ideas.
Another thing that we have learned about group work is that the work needs to be evenly distributed to get the best results. It does not work well when one person takes over the project and does practically the whole thing themselves. When this happens, only one person’s skills and opinions are used.
When everybody puts the similar amount of work and effort into the project then everyone’s opinions are voiced in the final project. Also, this allows everyone in the group to contribute what they are good at to the group. Basically, when working in groups, actually working together instead of acting as individuals is half the battle in creating a successful end result.