For our Applied Art poetry site project, I decided to feature the work of Philip Larkin. I have tried to create a design that is attractive, but appropriate for the tone of Larkin’s poems. He was renowned for having a particularly dark and gloomy outlook on life, hence my use of black and grey with some sombre accent colours.

With regards to typography, I have focused strongly on font type, font size, visual hierarchy and line and letter spacing. I decided to use Droid Sans and Droid Serif which are both web fonts available to use via Google Web Fonts. I feel that these two fonts contrast very nicely, helping to create both attractive headers and neat body copy.

I have also added a letterpress effect to the site title and the drop cap at the start of each poem. This was achieved using css3 but degrades nicely through older browsers.

http://www.webdesignstuff.co.uk/work/bj230/philip-larkin/

I hope you enjoy my design and the wonderful (although somewhat sad) poems.