For my web essay, I started with a rough draft sketched out onto paper:

Then, I jumped onto Figma and began making up rough draft ideas for what my website could potentially look like. I took a screenshot of IDEO’s homepage for a rough idea of where I could start with my design:

I knew I wanted something clean and simple, like the IDEO website. I did, however, want to incorporate some more colour into my design- but didn’t know which colours I wanted yet.

Below is the first draft of my layout. At this stage, my essay hadn’t been refined yet and I hadn’t completed my reference list, but I wanted to gauge the general layout so I could visualise my website better when it came to doing up my HTML and CSS files.

I initially wanted rounded buttons at the top of the page which would be used to navigate the site. Then, I decided I wanted to keep it simpler and just use text which changes colour when hovered over.

I started to think of colour schemes and knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate a shade of orange. I wanted orange as it is seen as a colour representing creativity and imagination, which I felt fitting for the theme of design thinking. I started experimenting with different layouts and tried different ways of incorporating a bright, fun shade of orange.