Assessment and art direction
Last night I added a touch of color to the design in progress, to see how different it would feel, and then bolstered my sketchy markup and style with Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate. Getting my brain into the boilerplate made me want to hurry up and connect Tumblr and get this all actually flowing as a designed theme! But before I go any further, now is a good time to assess the design decisions I’ve made and consider art direction in a way that, in this project, I haven’t yet.
Art direction
For some projects, especially client projects, I’ll have a strong concept from the very start (often sparked by the first client meeting). For others, especially personal work, it’s harder to define and stick to a concept. Not only is it hard to decide on a style to represent my own work, it’s hard to think objectively about the design when I have my hands right in it and have been looking at it for days or weeks.
This is partly why my earliest processes involve reasons and emotions. I can often look back on those steps for inspiration. I can see that I had previously hoped this redesign would be simple, reliable, organized, and up-to-date, among other things. I think what I have so far is a decent step in the simplicity direction. As for organized and up-to-date, I think I can introduce some timestamps and navigation that will help.
“Reliable” is jumping out at me as a key phrase. Unfortunately, I don’t have any more adjectives like that for guidance. But that’s okay. Design inspiration can obviously come from something other than descriptive text.
One thing I can do is look at where I’ve taken the design so far – the typefaces and sizes I’ve chosen, as well as my initial dip into a color scheme – and consider this all in the context of designed things I admire, things I aspire for this content to live among, and even things that are more abstract, like nature. If I were working with content of specific dimensions or of potent aesthetic qualities, I could look to those things for cues. I dribbbled a small chunk of the design. Framing small portions of a design in progress can really help you step back and evaluate it in a more objective way. Like a new perspective on something with which you’re already very familiar.
I’m going to need to think about this. Ideas welcome! @nicewebtype
