Some More About the Wedding Website...

I'm really sorry that I can't share any good tutorials on how we created our wedding website. Unfortunately, like I told you before, the process was pretty much trial and error, so there's not a lot of wisdom that I have to share...

Still, I would love to tell you a little bit more about the website design process. In particular, the Architect really wants me to show you some of his original inspiration. The Architect is excellent at sketching. (I think that is a prerequisite for his profession. No?) So... he started off by doing some drawings to come up with an overall concept for the website.

I gave him some input early on and told him that I definitely wanted the orange garden lily to play a role in our website, so this is what he started with:
(That is supposed to be the garden lily BTW. This one is a very rough sketch.)

Next up was the design concept. The Architect wanted to have a simple Flash frontpage where the lily would draw itself on the screen, and then you would have the option of entering our website:
This is what it ended up looking like (using Flash) as a first draft:

I wish I had a movie of the Flash intro, but basically, the thick line draws itself on the screen from the right side to the left side of the monitor. After the outline of the flower has been drawn, the thinner-line detailing then fades in. Here's the final version, with the colors changed and some of the lines cleaned up:

At any time during the Flash intro you can click on our names to enter the website itself. From this jumping off point we designed the entire rest of our wedding website... and hey, it only took 2 months of round-the-clock effort ;-)

What is your design process? Do you use sketching to help focus your ideas (wedding-related or NWR)?