This week was the beginning of the project. As such, there was quite a few things to take care of. The design team is very focused and busy during the first portion of development. As part of the design team, I communicated heavily with the front end coders, the organization team, and my own team to decide how best to approach everything and what needed to be accomplished within the week's time. My team and I parsed through existing websites, garnering ideas and modifying or creating our own designs using thumbnail sketches. I then did a color comp along with everyone else, and we began to work on a finalized design.

On Wednesday night, I created a mock website, which I placed on the google docs for the design team to see (until we had a completed design). I used Adobe Illustrator and emailed this file to the team so that it would be easy for them to save, edit, and modify the site so that we could have a variety of options and colors.

On Friday, time was spent discussing the website with the front end, talking about the portal with the server side programmers, and getting an overall feel of where we were. We then decided to create a few more designs, and allow the client to choose before going ahead with the framework. Until the design is finalized by the client, it is difficult to set up a complete framework. But by producing the mock ups, I feel we will have several options to present them and this will lead to the best results.

For Monday, because I created the first mock up, the rest of the team is developing further designs on their own. I will however be working on a modification of my design as it is now in order to fit it around the portal that the back end programmers are creating.