Create a fan page for someone or something you deem deserving of the honor. Consider what qualities of the person/object are most visual and descriptive. Embrace the person/object and design a website that fully embodies their spirit.

On a weekend trip to the beach with friends, I discovered sunscreen was an incredibly polarizing topic of conversation. Some friends felt very passionately about the importance of wearing sunscreen, some saw it as a necessary evil, some thought it was good but rarely wore it, and some didn’t think it was worth wearing at all. The range of reactions to a product I assumed everyone saw the benefits of inspired me to make a fan page for sunscreen.

I gathered much of my content from text conversations with friends. I wanted to explore how fact and opininon interacted to create responses in people through my website. Furthermore, I wanted it to expose the real truth of the importance of sunscreen.

The landing page of the site is meant to mimic the front of a sunscreen bottle. It is for that reason that SPF is in big, bold text in the center of the screen. I wanted to abstrract that idea a little, though, which is why I went with wavy features at the bottom. Beyond the obvious beach associations, I associate the shape of sunscreen bottles with waves. The bottle’s drug facts are located on the bottom right corner of the page. Clicking on ”drug facts“ is almost like flipping over the bottle.

When you land on the drug facts page, you see a very conventional and familiar looking layout. Clicking into each tab, though, reveals a mess of information related to sunscreen. The juxtaposition between the neat exterior and personal, messy, in-your-face interior is meant to echo the difference between the knowledge that sunscreen is good and the public’s varying response to it. I chose to go with the default sans-serif for the entire site. As a font, it is able to be fun, opinionated, straightforward, informative, and playful, depending on context. Not to mention it is a relatively block-y font, which fits the sun block theme.

The content, as was mentioned, was gathered mostly from text conversations, but I also did some of my own research to support and dispute some of the things I heard from my friends. As I discuss in my reflection, I’m not sure the content is particularly effective in communicating a cohesive story. It is an ecletic mix of things, which I find enjoyable to discover, but I think it could have been more curated to communicate a clearer message to the user.

This project was the most difficult for me this semester and I'm still not entirely pleased with how it turned out. I feel my strongest work this semester was when I was very conscious of my choice of type, content, etc. Those decisions really got away from me with this fan page project, and I stil haven't been able to pinpoint why. A major factor in that was not being able to figure out what story I wanted to tell about sunscreen, beyond wear it, and that shows.

Right now, the information on the site is a bit difficult to access. I wanted to juxtapose opinions on sunscreen with facts about it, but I think this could have been achieved in a different way. I think there's something to the more personal nature of the tabs hidden in the conventional ”Drug Facts“ design, but I think the text in the tabs could be made smaller and the headers of each section could be made sticky to make the user experience better.

The landing page could also use some work. Supposed to mimic the front of a sunscreen bottle, it doesn't really acheieve that effect. It was more of an afterthought, so I should consider more actively how to make it clear that you are ”flipping over“ the bottle to the drug facts.

That said, I did still have a lot of fun with my sunscreen fan page. Mostly because the process of gathering content from friends was really entertaining. Texting people I hadn't spoken to in months about their thoughts on sunscreen yielded some really fun conversations. I earned myself the reputation of having a weirdly strong interest in SPF and that is quite a fun thing by which I wil remember this project.