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This photo image is felicitous in several ways. Most importantly, it
introduces the bright warm golden color that, by contrast with the
logo's magenta, suddenly brings the design to life. At the same
time, the dark blue sky that shows through the clouds parallels the
color of the logo, thus preventing the composition from breaking
apart. The formless texture of the clouds beautifully complements
both the geometric simplicity of the strip and the complicated
symmetry of the logo. In the bottom bar, I used another part of the
image, with more bright yellow and no blue; this way, it feels like
a continuation of the top image with the sun close to its bottom
edge.
On the negative side, it cannot be denied that the skyscape theme
itself is a cliche (enough to remember the millions of
Windows 95 startup screens popping up daily all around the
world). However, I think a cliche is unacceptable only if it is
needlessly and artificially introduced to imitate a popular
theme. Here, the use of the photo is justified by the intrinsic
logic of the composition.
For the navigation bar, I finally abandoned Lucida Sans and used the
lowercase of the logo title's Optima font, pushing the row of labels
to the bar's bottom and aligning it along the horizontal axis of the
title on the left. The golden color of the clouds needed support in
other elements of the page, so I also used it for links and marked
fragments of the text. Finally, to stress the transition of the
white background on the left to the photo on the right, I added a
drop shadow behind the top bar, gradually thickening it to the right in
parallel with the photo.
This version of the front page was approved by the customer, but I
also needed to produce an equally persuasive design of a generic subpage before I could move on to working
with HTML and GIFs. Fig. 8 looks already very similar to the
final design of the site's home
page, but a number of important, though minor, changes were yet
to be introduced on the subpage design
and implementation stages.
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he crisp lines and realistic rendering of the
logo on the left dictated to use, for a contrast, some blurred
shapeless smears on the right side (this would also contrast with
the clear-cut edges of the strip, while on the left, the crisp logo
is opposed by the blurred spotlight), The shadows of the
letters as in 
