Socially-focused Web Site Milestone 1

I would like to make a website about the social construction of gender in American society. This subject is compelling to me because I have experienced and/or witnessed the negative impacts of our society’s opposing and rigid perspectives of masculinity and femininity. I have also been fortunate enough to grow up in an age where more people are embracing more fluid conceptions of gender. Still, however, many people express confusion and suspicion about the fluidity of sex and gender, and the relationship/difference between the two qualities. My website will aim to absolve the perplexity and doubt surrounding this issue.

People of all ages and walks of life could do with some clarity about the social construction of gender, but I find that people aged 45+ show more uncertainty about it than other demographics because they grew up in a time when the nature of gender and sex was less questioned/studied. Thus, this age group will be my target demographic.

Because my target demographic includes seniors, and because my social issue is so nuanced, my website must be easily legible and visually coherent. My goal is to obliterate confusion, not facilitate it. Therefore, I want to use a font that imbibed with connotations of authority–an unprofessional font would lessen the credibility of the text. I would also like the leading to be 1.2 – 1.4 pt and the font size to be slightly larger than average. This should hopefully be easy on the eyes for my target demographic.

Since I want the tone of my website to be informative, sleek, and unassuming, my page design should (hopefully) be seemingly conventional yet abstract. I would like to incorporate minimalistic abstract design elements to entice the user, but I don’t want to distract from the content or overwhelm them visually. Again, professionalism is key, because the content is factual and explanatory. I don’t want any design elements to take away from this.

So, onto the design. Here are some thoughts I had while creating my mock-up:

Green will be my primary color because it is the easiest color for the eyes to process. It also usually incites a pretty neutral emotional response, which may help my website seem approachable and informative. I’ll use it for menu tabs, titles/headlines, and for highlighting important information.
My accent color will be a burnt orange. I’ll use it for subtitles, the current menu tab, and for highlighting secondary information. I’ll probably use it for quotes, too.
I am purposefully not using any blue or pink because those colors carry a lot of connotations when it comes to gender in the western world.
Color scheme idea:
I’ll use the font Trebuchet MS because its a web-safe font and is installed on most everyone’s computer. I’ll use CSS to bold key words and change the case for titles with text-transform values.