Project Two: Home page design developements

I ended up choosing to use the hexagon design rather than the other concepts I did in illustrator. I thought the hexagon style layout would be abit more challenging for me. Here are a few variations of what I have come up with for the homepage using the hexagons. I really wanted to keep the design as simplistic as possible. All the colours I have used have been picked from the web swatch in Illustrator. I have also decided to use the font 'Roboto' which is available on Google fonts. I am going to use this for everything on my website and save the font I designed myself for something else. It just didn't really look right when applied to the rest of the webpage. 

Sketch of  the layout I am now going to develope.

Variation one:

I like the idea of having the menu either side of the logo at the top and keeping the footer as minimal as possible. I decided that having just words in the hexagons was abit boring so I have done half words, half icons and when you hover over each one a full description of the link will appear. 

Variation two:

I still like the idea of having a hidden menu that opens on a new page like the example I found in my research. I have done a couple of variations below to show what the menu could like when it is opened. I really like the one with the hexagons in the background. I think it helps show consistency and of course repetition. 

Variation three:

After thinking about it some more I have decided that having the menu options in the footer is not the best idea for my design because then people might think that all the options are in the hexagons too, when they are not. then again maybe it doesn't matter if it all fits on the screen without having two scroll down for ages to get to the menu in the footer. 

Variation four:

Tried a different colour scheme. Not really feeling this as much as the others. 

Variation five:

I think I like this colour scheme the most. It's just brighter and I think will appeal to a wider audience compared to the soft colours in the very first examples. I have also done an example below to show what the hexagons as a background would look like in these colours. 

Variation six:

Using the above layout I just wanted to see what it would look like using colour for more of the outlines rather than lots of block colour. I can't decide what I like more at the moment.