This Dictionary of Literary Terms is my redesign project for my ENGL380/INFO390 class in the Spring of 2011 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I found Joel Littauer's original site (which can be found here) while searching for literary term definitions, something I have done quite often as an English major. I decided to use it for my redesign project because I thought that the title image was too busy and bright, the background colors were unnecessary, and the term lists were very long; overall I thought the site was poorly designed for web readers.

The choices I made in my redesign were all geared towards improving the site aesthetically. There is not much one can do with the long lists of terms, as this site's function is a dictionary. However, I found that by spreading it out into smaller columns, the list became easier to manage. I also got rid of the "Read This First" page and just added the most important parts of its content to the splash page. I created a new title image that I thought was more applicable to the site's purpose and less bright, therefore not assaulting one's eyes. I disabled all of the links to the original author's e-mail address, but left his name to give him credit for all of the site's content. I also deleted any broken image links (aka, all of the image links) and added some color to the links on each page.