When the website design is completed for a particular tangible product, it might be interesting to integrate a small working copy of that product into the website itself. For example, we decided to add a web-based climate clock gadget to the Climate Clock website. The idea has not yet been fully developed, but the general description is established. The Climate Clock of San Jose is supposed to drive awareness about the environmental impact on Earth. At the same time, the new website will represent a smaller visual climate clock which will display Silicon Valley at different stages of its development. While real photographs will be used as a reference to picture the past, the future representation will creatively depict a brighter age where everybody starts to take responsibility for his or her personal impact on the climate. The images would change depending on the time of day and new images will be added with time. This should stimulate interest in visitors and compel them to check the website more often. The images will be hand illustrated and fully original. At first, I was planning to incorporate a set of such images in the background, but the website would look too crowded with not enough space to display the background fully. It would be a waste of a good painting; besides, if the viewer’s screen resolution is low, he or she will not be able to enjoy this feature at all. This is why I decided to place these illustrations into the footer. It is compact and visible; the defined width and height help as well, since the background illustration would be difficult to pull off if the size would wary.
As in every other creative project, maintaining high ethic standards in website design is very important. You should always use original materials where possible, request explicit permission when reusing someone else’s work, and give credit where it is due. When using copyrighted elements, such as commercial fonts, always make sure you have the appropriate license for them. For example, it is not acceptable to get commercially licensed font files from a friend even though his or her company paid for it; these are typically sold to every customer (non-profit or for-profit) individually. It is best to use elements that fall under General Public License (GPL) with very few restrictions on modifications, distribution, and use even in commercial projects. Using someone else’s work without permission will not only make your customer liable but permanently ruin your reputation as a designer.
On a related note, you should not share the intermediate looks of your design or the final version with external parties without an explicit permission from your customer. Since the website that you create typically becomes their property, it is very important to protect the confidentiality of all related materials at all design stages. Sharing of any information has to happen strictly on “need to know” basis (i.e. when you need someone else to complete a portion of the design) and should be agreed upon by the customer. Since the Climate Clock team is aware that I am performing this website design as part of the college course, some information sharing is assumed. However, I would still like to wait until the website is completely ready before showing it publically; even then, I would have to get permission from Danelle to ensure they are ready for the world to see the new design.
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