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Gamingredients
Reflecting the curiously conceptualised Gamingredients is its cerealbox-shaped design, created fully in CSS. Behind the site is an extensive engine driving clean URIs, usable navigation and interaction, and an integrated forum design to keep users, writers and developers comfortable within a consistently presented website.
Presenting a unique perspective on games industry journalism and commentary is Gamingredients, a webzine created specifically to fill a gap that was felt needed filling. Part of the vision of Gamingredients is in the way it approaches product reviews and critical game design analysis: it treats creative products like videogames creatively, by giving developers' intentions as much or more weight as the final product. The result is a journalism voice with a strong identity and argumentation that can be respected by its audience and competitors alike.
The design I made for the site needed to have that "edge" that the content did, so under the guise of the cerealbox concept I set out to bring forth the food-related style and apply it to a website. One of the biggest considerations was of converting a cerealbox into a usable and navigable website that provided users with as much comfort and clarity as possible. The solution was to take an actual empty cerealbox, unfold the cardboard and flatten it, and then convert that into a design. As a result, most of the idea of a cerealbox remains in the design, but it has been shaped to meet users' needs.
On top of the visual concept, the site needed to be styleable per magazine issue, so I had to seperate not only content and programming logic from the presentation, but also seperate presentation into modules that decided first on overall structure, then on basic elements like form styles and table delineations, and then left typography and colours up to the issue stylesheet. This allows site managers to craft a new sub-identity around each issue while keeping the navigation and structure intact so as not to confuse visitors of the website.
