Day 3

7Shadows May 6
After the first mockup, I wasn’t too sure how it well it would apply to the rest of the pages of the site such as the View page and User page. I want this site to be highly customizable and as effortlessly as possible.

Mockup 2
So I started a second mockup, this time more based on a community that’s pretty hot to the Shadowness users nowadays and that’s Facebook. I like the simplicity and flatness of their layout. But I’m not sure how good it would look on a dark layout...

And... it didn’t have enough contrast. It also felt too much like Facebook. There is something about trying to get a more usable product and end up copying something largely. I hate that. It’s not that I don’t have the creativity, it is that liking too much something will refrain you from being original at all. I disliked the look of the logo and how it doesn’t stand out.

Mini-Brainstorm
I also started thinking how cool it would be to have a mini-brainstorm feature where anyone signed or not could post ideas on how to improve the items posted. People would be able to discard posts or vote up and posts would not be sorted by time but by number of thumbs up.
Just an idea...

On paper
Something unusual for me -- I started puting ideas and drawing layouts on paper. So, I don’t want many categories so it would be simple to select and browse. Shadowness is small and it shouldn’t pretend that it’s big. We would have Digital Art, Traditional Art and Tutorials. 3 big Art sections that covers every background possible.

History with Facebook
A lot of you know that I worked on CampusNetwork with Adam Goldberg -- its founder-- , which years ago was made about at the same time Facebook started to get really popular. CN was quite richly made while Facebook chose simplicity. As Adam says, a lot of it was a guessing game. However, I'll make a bold but true statement: Facebook wouldn't probably exists if it wasn't for an early version of CampusNetwork -- CUCommunity, an idea started by Adam of a photos/journal community for students (made before Facebook). Shadowness V3 is the start. It's what inspired CUCommunity which in turn inspired the making Facebook. They, Mark Zuckerberg and his team, made a better and more usable product, hence why we made CampusNetwork to compete with it. As you know, Facebook is now one of the most popular Websites, and we abandonned CampusNetwork to move on with other projects.