Design Success and Failure in Relation to Syntactical Guidelines

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I believe this web design is successful with its composition because it has a good use of the syntactical guidelines. This is a good example of how one doesn't have to sacrifice aesthetics for simplicity, in this case, simplicity refers to the fact that the website is easy to read. For example, there's a good balance in between the left "Categories" side and the right "New Releases" side. Neither over power the other, but work together as one to enhance one another. Also, the fact that there's only two groupings make this website much easier for the eye to navigate around. There's stress on the right-hand corner area where the name/logo of the site is located, which is a good thing because it draws attention to it and that's what you want. Color is also used wisely, lime green is used to emphasize the link that's active as well as the price of the album, which needs to be visible. All in all, I think that this web design achieves rapid and easy surfing by using the syntactical guidelines to its advantage. 

 

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I believe this web design is not as successful as the previous one in its composition because it has somewhat of a bad use of the syntactical guidelines, although it's not as bad. First off, the fact that everything is one solid color doesn't make it easy to distinguish the groupings intended. For example, on the top right-hand corner, the links would be more visible if they were the negative color from the rest of the site. Meaning that the text would be orange and the text box would be white with a black outline. Also, it would be much more balanced if there were two links right after the other and two more links below them, so it would form a rectangle (closure). Also, the grouping at the bottom of the page would be more prominent if there was even a slight color change, perhaps another tone of orange, instead of just depending on a size difference. Thus, it would separate itself from the big orange box that's the body and context of the page. Overall, this site is okay but with a couple of changes here and there that favor the syntactical guidelines, this page would be above average.