Skins: Round One

Skins: 3 design directions

Final Wire Frames

On skinning my wireframes

I have finally begun designing my first skin for my wireframes. I am still in the very early stages of my first skin but I've decided that a little break for blogging would be a great way to take a break from designing and reflect on  what I've been doing thus far.

These are shaping up to be a little different than the wire frames but the overall concept is the same. What I have below is the frame for my content. Each of these boxes have the ability to minimize and rearrange within the grid. The user can control which news section they want to have open and how much of it they would like to be able to view.

I repeat, very early stages.

Wireframe Sketches

These are my initial wire frame sketches. Through this process I was able to work through my ideas and figure out what qualities I really wanted to incorporate. The main idea behind my design is customization. I want the user to be able to view what they want to view, unlike many news websites where there is so much information thrown at you in one viewing. I'd like to slow the pace down and allow the user to pick and choose what topics sit on their screen.

10 New Year's Resolutions for Designers

Well, there is no way to put this other than to say that all of these are on my list. Particularly, stop trying to save bad work. Once I read this I realized that I do this. I do this quite often. Honestly, I didn't even realize I did this until I read it in this article. And it is true, the urge to try and save something that you know may have no hope is brought on by the fact I don't want to feel like I've wasted my time. As discussed in class, having good saving new compositions in the middle of your work is a habit we should all start doing. Having one composition and working on it for hours at a time without tracking all the very different and very many things you have been trying is a problem. I'll make a larger effort to address this issue as I'm working, but when I get in the groove of things I tend to forget what's going on around me. Which leaves me to wonder...is there a short key for this (saving a new comp, rather than saving over your last command + s)? Is there an app for this?...

The Web is 95% Typography

This article argues that web designers should take the time to master typography since the internet is primarily text. In the past, the internet has been known for producing some rather unattractive and sometimes difficult websites to get through. But even though the site may have some rather painful design systems, the problem to focus on is the reading experience. Extra wide body copy, difficult navigation, overwhelming clutter seems to occur on the web more often that it should. In my experience, looking at this without any design knowledge, I didn't even know that these were issues. I thought that extra wide body copy and no clear hierarchy was just how information was presented. I figured that I just had to adjust to whatever was on my screen. This is what I feel is part of the problem. Users may not know that there is a problem partly because they don't know that there are rules for proper typography. In order to identify a problem, you have to know that there is a solution available.