CSS Zen Garden

Websites With Typography:

1. Behance.net

This site is a place where artists display and publish their artworks. There are many good typographies and this makes behance a community for visual artists to learn from each other.

2. slack.com

The simple message yet stands out at the middle spices up the website. The color contrast also makes it work well and blends in.

3. michellephan.com

This site uses typography to emphasize on youthfulness and modern design. Typography helps the website appear more interesting with fun colors and playful interactive elements.

Internet Cats Questions

Websites That Store Information:

1. ebay.com

Ebay collects personal information such as nam, phone number, email or credit card numbers to create private accounts and processes online transactions. The information is used to help users purchase products from the site. 

2. surveymonkey.com

This site sends out surveys and collects data from others to help them make decisions based on the information provided by the site. This site also stores data and let users manage statistical results from the data.

3. youtube.com

Youtube stores information of individuals to help them build their own profile and channel. Youtube often asks for your name, your pictures, date of birth, email address, etc.

Artisan Lab II

1. robinmastromarino.com
This is simply a portfolio of a design student. I love the way he puts his own picture on the front page. It is black and white and goes with the website color theme and also acts as an emphasis for the main page. The idea is very bold and creative - literally putting a image of himself on the front page to sell himself.

2. vogue.com
Images place an important role in everyday life. They attract people much more than words do. Vogue - a fashion magazine uses images to convey the sense of style and theme of current fashion trends. Fashion is about images and it's nearly impossible to write about fashion without demonstrations. Images help enhance the design and more importantly the message of the website.

3. https://lunarway.com
The image does two things on this website. First, it acts as a nice dim background to help emphasize the green main message of the website. This is effective because the lines are bright green while the image is dimmed. Second, the image is a guy looking at his phone smiling. This helps promote the idea that the front page is trying to emphasize: mobile banking like never before.
The image on this website is very multi-functional.

Artisan Lab I

Question 1: Websites You Use

1. smartsite.ucdavis.edu
This website belongs to my school to provide educational purposes for students. It is a place where students connect to their classes virtually. They can access important documents, upload or submit assignments, and communicate with their professors, TAs and other students. This website is a tool for education.

2. facebook.com
Facebook is a social media website where I can create my own profile, update and socialize with friends and family. It is a tool to help me as an individual to connect with others. It is also a way of updating news around the world by subscribing to news, magazine pages such as CNN, BBC or Vogue. Overall, it is an important site because it helps me connect with the world virtually.

3. etsy.com
This is an online shopping site that allows users to buy and sell unique handmade products. I am a seller on easy and I sell handmade camera straps to help pay for my tuitions. It is a useful website if you have handmade products and want to sell them without having to open a real shop. It is also a nice community where buyers can find unique and customized products from small-scaled private family-owned shops.

Question 2: Competitor Websites

The biggest competitor of Etsy is Ebay.com. Ebay is one of the largest and most well-known market for online shopping between people around the world. However, Ebay is slightly different. It only allows users to sell and buy products that are produced by big manufacturers. In other words, they do not allow handmade products that do not have trademarks or official brands. Although anything can be sold on Etsy, Etsy focuses more on handmade products so this site fits my needs more. I am able to target the right group of audience by selling Etsy. Other than that, these two websites overall provide similar features.

Question 3: Visually Great Websites

1. http://lamoulade.com

This is a website of a studio in London. The design is so interactive that makes users feel good surfing on their website. The combination of good illustrations, modern and stylish fonts with nice images and bright colors visually attracts users. The website also has cute sounds when users move the mouse to certain areas of the page. La Moulade uses yellow and white as the theme colors, which is very simple yet effective. There isn't much typography on this website. They only play a little with their logo: unique font with a flower next to the studio name.

2. http://squarefactor.com
This website attracts people with large images that take up the whole page and videos with abstract moving artworks/animation. They also include videos to demonstrate the content of the website. The theme colors are black, white and orange-brown. There are lots of typography throughout the web with different styles to demonstrate different groups/organization.

3. http://trumpdonald.org
This is my favorite recent discovery. This website has a very cool feature: using a trumpet to make fun of Donald Trump. The trumpet moves along with the mouse and if the user holds down the mouse, the trumpet will blow away Trump's hair and his face expression is hilarious. This interactive feature makes this website fun. It uses basic colors for the web title: red, blue and white. The site is straightforward and simple but very fun to play around with. There is no typography on this website.