Enjoy as I show you some of my thought process.

1. When Ideas Become Tangible

2. The World Wide Web is chalk-full of images & I do not wish to see many of them.
So , I began dreaming of a site with only great images.
I pictured the site on a 1280 px wide screen at first & set goals. Then, I designed
from a mobile-first framework. The necessities easily uncover themselves.
Speed on a mobile device is more important than on a pc, so designers must be
aware of image size and excessive calls to the server. It is also important for key
information & interactions to be on all devices, i.e. the necessities.
Build goals with full site. Weed out superfluous content & interactions for mobile
devices. Start to build out wireframes, or transfer the images in your brain to
code if you’re really good at it. Add the anti-necessities as you work your way up
the media-query ladder.

3. Immediate goals for the site:
• Only great photography (portraiture to start)
• Enlighten the world with help from inspiring photographers
• Give credibility/recognition to photographers
• Create a place for learning, exploration and joy
• Make it fun and easy to share
• Allow anyone and everyone to submit
I confided in friends of all sorts. Some were photographers, some enjoyed
photography and some could care less.
Branding Brevity
Candied Faces is intriguing, fun, colorful and relatable across
global cultures. No piece of candy is the same & it is
everywhere. Just like faces. Humans may be the most
complex creatures and candy may be the most captivating &
controversial manufactured good on the planet.

4. Not enough interactivity 2-column didn’t feel right More interactivity on left
Not enough emphasis on image Center image and even out page
Wireframes starting to flow

5. There are no other high quality portrait gallery websites (that I could find), so I
researched other photography websites heavily in the beginning stages and
lightly throughout the entire process.
You can learn incredible amounts by simply watching someone use
an existing website in your niche, or a similar niche.
Which I did a fair amount of.
This provided a smooth and natural transition to the next stage >>

6. I listened to stake holder input and began coding.
I hired a JavaScript programmer to build out the custom slideshow, and…
Iterations were super fast because I was doing all the HTML & CSS.
Then, I threw out the slideshow and bowed down to KISSaB
KEEP
IT
KISS has adapted:
STUPID • I don’t like calling people stupid.
• Everything should be functional & beautiful.
SIMPLE
and
BEAUTIFUL

7. Social sharing did not work properly with the JavaScript + MySQL mash-up.
Instead of creating a completely dynamic slideshow, I decided to create
individual, static PHP pages for each image. Files are cached and jQuery pre-
loads the next and previous images.
A simple solution to a convoluted JavaScript mess.
Received great feedback from users,
validated, and launched.
Research > build > iterate > observe > iterate > observe…
“Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
Read about usability tests I held after the launch.