For my Internet Studio I midterm project, I picked Qingdao, China as my travel location since it's my family's hometown. I don't visit China often, but Qingdao is my favorite city, and I have many fond memories from there.
As for my stylistic choices, I wanted to give my travel website a clean and easy to navigate look. I wanted a clean look to imitate Qingdao's open and clean environment. In order to do things, I try to keep the placement and proximity of the elements and text well spaced out for easy viewability. The images and text isn't made too small for easy reading accessibility as well. I placed the buttons underneath the information paragraphs for activities that needed tickets or optional reservations. I placed them there so after readng the descriptions, if viewers had interest they could easily book.
I used this logic for my color palette and text font as well. I picked a simple and minimal color palette to keep things easy on the eyes and cohesive. As for the specific colors I picked a more muted, varying red shades, since red is China's national color. Red represents luck, prosperity and happiness. I didn't want to make the red too saturated in tone and hue, because I felt it was straining to the eyes, and could come off as tacky for my websites intended image. Other colors I included were white for the background and grey and black for the text. I felt it was simple and had easy readability. For the text font, I picked 'Albert Sans' and 'Anonymous Pro' because they were clean and visually appealing fonts. Originally when picking a logo and header font I picked 'Akronim' because it felt similar to "traditional" and stereotypical Chinese fonts. However I realized it looked a bit messy, and when the font size wasn't big enough, 'Akronim' looked blurry and wasn't comfortable to read. Because of this I changed it to 'Anonymous Pro', which I felt was still unique but better fit my vision.
Onto my stylistic choices for the images, I picked images that I felt best represented the appealing qualities of the specific location or for whatever was needed. I wanted to pick the pictures that would grab peoples' attention or put a spotlight on certain things like popular foods or views those visiting Qingdao might want to see. Not just for appeal, but I also picked pictures and locations that I felt could suit a variety of people. For example, picking the aquarium more suited for kids, or a brewery for adults or those interested in history. Same with the restaurant choices, some had a more casual and budget frendly, and some with a more "expensive" luxury experience depending on the situation. By doing this, it also gives my website visual and informational variety. If all the restaurant locations were similar it would get boring and redundant to look at.