Starting concepts

Hey there !
Today we're going over the starting concepts for my website layout !

It all started with that layout :

I drew this before the module started 'cause I bought the domain on which I'm gonna host my site last summer, it's the very core concept we're starting from.
"Simple", "bright", "colourful", "easy-to-access" and "cool no trespassing lines-type bands" spring to mind.
That hard-to-read thing written in pencil at the bottom left is a scribble of the evolution system used in the game Patapon 2. One of the concept I want to base my website on is that of an archive, that would let you view every version of the website that ever got put online at any time, and I wanna have a system of buttons organized like a tree much like that system. The buttons would toggle older versions of the flash interface displayed. More on this in the next image.

I then developed it into that baby :

Same basic concept and layout but I started thinking about what pages it should actually link to, the content of my website-to-be, how many buttons I should have on the right side, etc.
This is the final concept for the homepage as of yet, but it also made me realize that now, I have another 7 pages to design, as I want to give each one a personal identity, which would conform to the same homebrew overall style, linking them all together.
Notice the button system I mentioned at the bottom. Andrew advised to get into XML on this one, I'm rather dreading this part to be honest but I ordered a book on that so we shall see ...

So there's final concept as of yet for the 2nd page, the Music page :

I somehow came up with that cool hexagonal concept thing, got now idea how to be honest, but I wanna stick with it ! All pages are going to be organized loosely around a round centrepiece that I want to use in the fold-in and fold-out animations of each page. As I want to host each page as a separate flash application on a separate web adress within a separate HTML sheet thingy, it's important that they all have the same starting point and finishing point in their animation to facilitate linking them together, so the idea so far is to make them come out of a little sphere and fold back into it as well. It'll make a lot more sense once I got a working 1st mockup of that whole thing, which shall be the 1st thing I get down to once I got my final 8 page concepts.

Another thing that came out of all that is that I'm gonna need icons for each page, so there's more development on the said icons & the coming 3rd final concept as of yet-to-be, for the Art page :

So I got to a point where I'm comfortable with what precisely is gonna be on each icon, now it's all a matter of actually making them ...
And I'm planning on using signs and symbols I developed last term in our Beyond Desktop Publishing module on InDesign. I got a whole family of little pieces of squares, rectangles and circles that work within a square grid and I'm gonna use those to create neat simple icons that I shall then get onto flash through Illustrator.

It's all planned !
Now it's all a matter of actually getting down to it ...

More soon, hopefully I'll have a mockup by then.

Bie for now !