Kukuicup Design

I'm taking a step back this week from tinkering with the RUI code in order to make the site "pretty".

Last Friday, the PM(Project Manager) tasked the group with redesigning the Kukuicup website. 
Let me rephrase that - Last Friday, the PM  asked a group of twenty-something year-old CS-majors to redesign a website...


What happens when you ask a group of twenty-something year-old CS-majors to redesign a website?  You get Matrix-themed websites. 

The PM was not amused. 

To be fair, there was only one Matrix-themed website, but we were all thinking about it. 

The following Tuesday, we had a rapid-prototyping session, where we presented our ideas, and were given immediate feedback.  The PM pointed out that large amounts of time and money had been poured into the HCI aspects of the site, and that we weren't improving on that temporal/monetary investment.  As a result, we were instructed to simply change the "theme" or "look and feel" of the website rather than mess with any of the layout or display elements. It was also dictated that there be no "dark" backgrounds.

Later in the week, we were told to modify a few CSS files to pull out the snippets of CSS that controlled the look/theme for elements so that they might be more easily modified.

My initial idea for the Tuesday presentation was to go with the PM's desire (and numerous related e-mails) for a brightly colored "gamey" theme.  Since the Kukuicup will potentially be used by institutions other than UHM(University of Hawaii at Manoa), I had to have a relatively generic design.  However, I still wanted to incorporate the idea of team/school colors.  My solution was to have a generic Kukuicup banner with bright "gamey" team colors thrown in as accents. 

*Note the banner shown to the right is not the one I had wanted to use, but the one I was forced to use as I didn't have access to the $100 required to purchase the not-to-be-named program, required to open the desired file.

After the criminalization of "dark" backgrounds, I decided to go with a mid-toned grey with black stripes thrown in to break up the monotony.  I also followed one of the suggestions the PM directed at me and added a ghosted-logo.  I would have liked the image to be darker, but was worried that the PM might prosecute me for my repeated transgression.  I also tried adding the brightly-colored accents back in, but they just didn't seem to 'fit' anymore. 



The current mockup:

And mobile...