Session 2 of An Event Apart Chicago 2009 was Jason Santa Maria talking about small things that can make a big difference in a design.
example of: Choose your own adventure books: tiny choices affecting the outcome
7 things that can affect the outcome
- Be a thinker
- keep a sketchbook
- sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker
- get past all of the obvious and to the real creative stuff
- play around with words (how does the content work in space)
- know your process, know your tools – (computer is a tool of refinement, mind is a tool of design)
- Find the Message
- this one ran together w/ #1 in my mind, so some notes from #1 should probably go here.
- Be a Reverse Engineer
- more than one way to do it
- 6 ways to reinterpret content
- Next/Prev Panel
- Zoom In/Out
- Embellish or Exaggerate
- Disarm
- Deconstruct
- Re-contextualize
- Plot it out
- just choosing a grid system is crap: why are you using it – “blindly go where everyone has gone before”
- using a grid is not necessarily good design, it’s just organized design
- Think Horizontally, then Vertically
- grid=parfait
- tiers building on each other
- Stop, Modulate, and Listen
- identifier, size, and placement
- a la carte modules
- class=”pic four left”it’s a picture, four columns wide, on the left
- easy for clients to pick up on it and use, easy to place/repurpose content (the uber-semantic nazis flamed JSM for this, but there comes a point where usability for the content creators > semantics for the sake of semantics sake)
- Be a Matchmaker
- typography online; matching fonts
- pair typefaces from the same designer
- harmony in structure
Q&A
- Why is typography going to be heating up?
- @font-face, TypeKit, etc.
- Modular? Semantic class names?
- easy to use > purely semantic
- Isn’t licensing the big hurdle w/ @font-face?
- yes, that is a big hurdle but a bigger problem is that fonts aren’t designed for screen
- How do I make sure I’m not violating copyright?
- Look at EULA
- What point of the process do you look at colors, photo styles?
- Early on, seting the mood, during sketch phase
- Flexibility on site (separate design per blog post), can you sell that to clients?
- Yes, to a certain extent. If the client has a trained designer (but, a certain amount can be accomplished by placing images within blog posts using modular layout discussed above).
- When do you bring IE in to the picture?
- as he goes along, it tends to get later and later in the game
- Does modular design described above work in expanding layouts?
- image sizing is the issue in fluid grid (%, em), otherwise, could work
- don’t like variable image sizes
- How do you prevent bad design (from client)?
- question any change requests that aren’t from the user perpective
- How do you build sketching early on? (I couldn’t figure out what I meant by what I wrote here when I went to edit–maybe some day I’ll remember…)
- phase of discovery, along with research, etc.
- Special consideration for grid systems to work in CMSs?
- no, it’s all CSS, so CMS doesn’t make a difference
- Materials for developers/non-designers to understand design?
- jasonsantamaria.com/reading