Homepage Artistry...

Since I'm dealing with a fictitious store, there's no actual storefront to shoot a picture for the basis of my homepage idea, so finding the right image online was HUGE... after a bit of searching, I came across a pic of a lonely, closed store located in Niles, Michigan that was an ideal fit for my Art Deco-styled signage.

So I toyed around with the image, colorized it, cleaned up some of the rough edges, used the fun stamp tool in Photoshop to wipe out the Closed sign as well as an automobile reflecting in the glass, tried out a few effects, and here's where I'm at for the moment.

This building will set up nicely for my homepage div structure, as the three-window setup will give me some options here. I'm thinking of using the large center window for a photo slideshow, featuring current specials, holiday deals, and the like. The black space beneath this window will work our great for the slideshow information. I can use the two side windows for showing a flavor of the month, deals on popcorn tins, lots of stuff.

As for the navbar/overhang, I'll still probably tweak the colors and bit to more evenly match the colors of the image. I'd like to get it so that the overhang really looks like it's been part of the building all along, and right now, it's not quite there.

Yay, the Logo's done...

I probably spent WAY too much time tinkering with this, as I've now got just three days to get the mockup pages done, but at least I've got a perfect logo to place on storefronts, popcorn tins, merchandise, etc.

The Final Two Logos

Honestly, I could spend another week just tweaking this thing endlessly, so I'm gonna step back and say that I'll go with one of these two variations and be done with it.

The only difference between the two options here is the depth of the letters. I might even take the deptho f the POP'S from the first one and use the Corn's Emporium depth from the second one.

Still more tweaks

Now I see why people get paid just to make logos for companies... so many small tweaks here and there changes the whole feel of it.

So here are some variations on what I thought might have been the final logo. I'm liking the top right one... for now.

Possible Final Logo

I think we're getting closer. The font's good, the spacing's good... now it's just wondering about the exact colors and thickness of the letters.

Updated Logos

I'm trying to get the logo to have a feel of antiquity with a touch or modernism... ugh, did that sound pretentious.

Take two... I want something that looks cool, new and old at the same time.

These particular fonts are of the Art Deco variety, which would relate to the store's being in business since the 1930's. As for the color scheme so far, I'd like to use colors that resemble popcorn kernels, so maybe that's too "been there done that", but hey, I'm new at this.

Total Redesign For Pop's Corn Emporium

So the original idea of having a sparse, white home page with 7 or 8 popcorn kernels for Pop's Corn Emporium... that wasn't working, as it was too minimal for this particular company. I needed to show more humanity, love, familiarity, etc.

So here's the updated home page - a complete redesign. I really like having the idea of putting the navbar into the overhang. The little dots in the navbar will actually be popcorn kernels, and when you roll over each kernel, you'll get a big, white piece of popcorn.

The storefront look gives me the nice option to put the homepage divs containing the deals, specials, new flavors, etc., into the actual storefront windows.

I'm still wondering what to do with the sidewalk section. I might reduce the perspective of this and make it thinner, and possibly use this for the footer instead of putting the footer into the curb like I have now.

I want to keep the size of all the pages a consistent height and width, so I'll need to use scroll bars for the content pages. When the user goes to these second-level pages, a larger box will take the place of the previous storefront window panes from the homepage.