Internet radio Day 3: Design

As well as researching content, we had to figure out what our site was going to look like, and how it would all fit together.

We've decided to go with a kind of narrative or story structure, so it seemed sensible to have one page per area, plus a home page to introduce the site, and maybe a separate page to put our actual radio show on and be a kind of conclusion. We sketched out a few simple site plans and agreed on the one you can see here.

We all discussed the plan and it seemed to make sense so we turned to the visual design of the site. Because we're using a narrative structure, it made sense to use characters with each character telling their part of the story. We started to think about how we could illustrate the stories and what stories we needed to bring our characters to life.

Ange: "I had the idea of a theme around some Charlie's Angels-type characters, kids who, for the good of the music, decide to set up an Internet radio station to play music that isn't usually heard. Quite '70s retro in style; lots of burnt oranges, browns and greens. I put together a colour palette and got some inspiration for both colours and patterns from looking at '70s wallpaper."

So far, so good. Unfortunately, we hit a hitch when it came to the actual characters. None of us can draw!

Andy: "I've hit a brick wall with the characters today. We gave up trying to draw them long ago, so we've been looking at various ways of cheating - an essential tool in any designer's toolbox! We've tried using silhouettes, so we wouldn't have to draw faces but it looks like a gothic comic book - not what we're after! We thought about re-using characters from old projects but none of them fitted, and drawing freehand - you don't want to see the results!"