It seems that the content on FSO is targeted more at college students and people beyond college looking to figure out the best courses to take, or what technical aspects of design they should be familiar with if they have an interest in the fashion industry (though there is an extensive list of schools offering fashion programs; sans descriptions, only links are offered).
The way in which it differs from my website, is that it does not have many student interviews, and the interviews available were only conducted with fashion professionals. Another thing is that FSO attempts to focus on design, textiles, illustration and patternmaking, while my site is trying to create a bigger picture of all the jobs that make up the fashion industry as a whole (it's a work in progress).
The articles written by the student contributors focus on specific topics; e.g. Intro to Fashion Journalism (course focus), Fashion Forecasting: Colour Forecasting and Trend Time-lines (how-to), Designing for Different Body Shapes and Sizes (how-to), The Dior New Look (history lesson). So far it looks like there are 24 total articles written by the student contributors. Similar to my site, there is also a review section. On FSO, there are 5 review articles covering websites they support, recommend tools for designers (singer sewing machine), and a suggestion to attend a gallery.
One of the problems I see with this site, is that while there are some authors that add images, there are several authors that do not... so their posts end up looking like this.
I can related to this as sometimes it is difficult to find an image that supports the message of a blog post. I don't want to start taking google images and need to cite everyone else's work all over my own blog full of original content unless I am writing about something specific that I do not have access to. Fortunately, while looking at these posts several ideas have come to me about images I can use that aren't necessarily my own creation, but they will be original; e.g. screen caps of the websites I am suggesting, scanned in images of project I have worked on that relate to my articles, Microsoft Word drawn cartoons, or color swatches with words that highlight the keywords of the article.
The Good: Detailed articles with vivid examples of what these fashion students have experienced.
The Bad: Could use more images, site is well organized, but is not visually appealing.
Felicitous and well-considered. It very much yelped for more visual structure though--structure associated with critical headings. Such would have further systematized your investigation. Absent that, it reads more like an editorial than a review--except at the very end, when you do offer two evaluative "handles": the good and the bad.
ReplyDelete