My own header and footer designs.

The dimentions of my header and footer will be:

Header - 300 px by 600 px

Footer - 50 px by 600 px


The name I choose for my website is Femme Fatale tattoos. I didn’t really want this website to appear too feminine and soft because tattoos hurt and are not soft and gentle, so I really wanted the theme of my website to reflect this. So the concept for my website was strong yet feminine.

A typical symbol of a femme fatale is usually red lips (or a strong colour lips stick that usually connotes power and sexuality). I created these lip stick marks below and scanned them in to use as a brush on Photoshop to add texture to my header image and to also be used possibly as or developed into a logo for the website.    

I then scanned these images in and converted them into brushes in Photoshop so it would become a vector image and could be reused and resized.

I am quite pleased with this design however I do not know if lip stick marks are the best logo for a tattoo website as a tattoo is a very permanent thing that unlike lips stick cannot be removed easily.

I will move on to looking at other icons and symbols that could connote femininity. Although I am very pleased with the text and feel that this is something I will bring through to my next design.  

I moved on to looking at roses as flowers are quite feminine and roses in particular have quite a strong and interesting connotation of love, desire and again sexuality, so this symbol too is quite empowering.

I found a few images of roses and done some sketches from these images to try and develop a logo based around roses.  
 

I began sketching roses in general and then moved on to try and stylise the roses to make them suitable to be used as a logo for a tattoo website.

I converted my favourite drawing into a Photoshop brush and used it to create the header image below. I do the simplicity of this design and a simple image like this could work really well for a web site like this, however I would like to develop this further.

I wanted to look at creating more tonal varitation within the image so I decided to experiment by adding a gradient to the back ground as you can see below. I also used one of my other drawings to see how this would work as a logo.

I do quite like this gradient effect. I will now see well this would work in composition with the whole website and to do this i am going to create a mock up in Photoshop.
I created these mock ups in photoshop to get a sense of what my header image would look like in my final design. I based my mock up on a one column fixed layout design as i think this will be the template i am most likely to use.

This is a mock up showing my first header design (the one with the lipstick marks). I do quite like how well this works. In this composition it does work a lot better than i could have imagined. However i still do not feel that the lip stick marks are the best thing to use for a logo for a tattoo website.

Again I really do like the simplicity of this banner. I think the rose looks very elegant and would be a fitting logo, however I will see how my final design will work in this composition as I am quite interested to see how the tonal variation would work.

I created a matching footer. For my actual website I may just use a repeated image as i have done in previous posts on this blog.

I still feel that this is the most successful out of my designs. I just love the tonal variation and how this effects the overall composition of the webpage.

I then added a background colour to my mock up to see which colour wouls be most appriate to use.

Here i just used the pale pink colour as the back gorund colour. I think this does work quite well as the blended in darker colour on the header and footer appear to frame the main body of the website.

I then experimented by using the darker pink colour as my back ground colour. However i do not feel that this is as successful as it feels quite overpowering and distracts from the main body of the website I feel.

Now that I have established which header and footer designs i will use i will now move on to researching horizontal navigation bars.