FSO: Fashion Students Online.com Design Review

I will evaluate this site based off of the elements listed in this article because I feel very biased about reviewing the site as it is quite similar to what I am doing with my own website.

Is the layout confusing?
The layout is a pretty standard three column design. The menu is easy to figure out and organized well with how many options are available. The home page seems to have a blog layout, though there is a menu navigation that you can click to "view as blog." I guess that is kind of confusing. Unless you haven't visited many websites, you should be familiar with how to easily get around this site.

Do you glide around the page naturally? Is the page balanced?
The page does seem to be fairly balanced, though it is very text heavy. The only images are in the header and in the right column; they are very unattractive, scam-like looking advertisements.

Does the color theme add to the site design?
The color theme of green, purple, and orange is not attractive to me at all. There is also some red text in the right column further throwing off the design appeal. In addition, the fashion students online logo (which I assume is the logo because it is in the header), is very plain (Microsoft Word font?) and colorless.

Are there any small details that add to the overall design?
There are not any details that add to the design. There aren't any custom looking elements, not even an attractive twitter button. Just this ugly little thing:


Are important elements, such as post headlines, clearly emphasized?
The post headings are clearly emphasized by an orange font. This looks a little ugly as it is placed on a website with purple as a main color. Hello Halloween?

Does the design make give the site a unique edge?
No, the site does not look very unique at all. There is a page that mentions that they are working on rebuilding the site. I feel like if they brought in a graphic designer to make a few custom images that match the look of the header, they would be well on their way to unifying and streamlining the look of the site. For example, look at these header and sidebar linked images from What I Wore:



Does the site allow commenting?
Yes, the site allows commenting, but it looks like there are only a few posts with 1-2 comments. Otherwise, it looks like it's normal for articles to have 0 comments.

Evaluation
I am as excited to see their site rebuild as I am to rebuild my own site with a layout that I am happy with. I think their site is nicely organized but could definitely use an upgrade on the custom design elements of the site; take it from a year 2000 site to 2010 site.

FSO: Fashion Students Online.com

My worst nightmare occurred when I came across this website one or two months ago. It has articles written from the point of view of fashion students as well as professionals, and everyone is encouraged to contribute. In addition, the site is set up so that the audience can become a part of a community and login to comment and earn points.

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.