Julia’s Digital Diary is an online collection of her varied interests, ranging from books and music to food and fun activities. In the “About” section, Julia explains to her audience that she wants her blog to be where she can talk about all her interests in one place. The home page of the site is designed to look like a notebook. The different shades of pink in the header are striking, and they remind me of diaries that I had as a younger girl, which creates a sense of nostalgia!
Julia’s site exhibits great balance. There are photos of varied sizes across the site that create visually appealing asymmetry. In addition, the photos used across the site, like the photo of Julia in the sidebar, create a nice contrast that makes her posts pop. I also think the site has accomplished a good sense of unity, as the font, colours, and style are uniform and consistent across the entire site. I thought it was great that the site’s theme carried over to Instagram as well.
The site is easy to navigate, with clear menu categories and post titles. As I was navigating through her site, though, I noticed that when you click on the “Blog” section, you are directed to a blank page. To fix this issue, Julia may have to edit her posts so that they are included on the blog category landing page. Additionally, it appears as though Julia is still working on a lot of her content, as there are a few posts that have titles and photos, but no content.
I enjoy the content that is up so far on the site. As someone who is also into books and music, I love hearing other people’s opinions on these topics. Julia’s writing style makes you feel like you are having a conversation with her, which is entertaining and relatable. When reading her post about “Nook,” I noticed that she mentioned a previous post she had written about another restaurant and included a very clear link back to that post, which is super smart. Additionally, I appreciated the seamless integration of her Spotify playlist in her “for life music” post.
I think that Julia would benefit from reading the assigned article from week 7 by Travis Gertz. In this article, Gertz discusses ways in which site administrators and designers can learn from editorial-style designers. I think this design style would translate well to Julia’s site, as it almost reads like a magazine. Overall, the design and layout of Julia’s site are visually appealing and easy to navigate, and her content is super fun to read.