May 29, 2008
By: Josh Walsh in Design
“Design is in the details.” - We hear it every day and it is absolutely true. However, details without a blueprint to tie things together can lead to problems. We are passionate about details, perfect grid alignment, perfect color combinations, gradients, reflections and textures. These visual details have a major aesthetic impact on the website, but they can’t replace the content - The reason the website exists in the first place.
When working on the visual concept for a web design or application I always start with the epicenter.
Epicenter design focuses on the true essence of the page — the epicenter — and then builds outward. This means that, at the start, you ignore the extremities: the navigation/tabs, footer, colors, sidebar, logo, etc. Instead, you start at the epicenter and design the most important piece of content first.37 Signals - Getting Real
I work in grayscale. I use varying shades of grey and font size to denote emphasis and priority. I work in sans-serif fonts and follow basic typography rules. I let the content speak for itself.
Garrett Dimon gave me a great little tip: blur your design.
I often find it useful to zoom out and use a Gaussian blur on visual designs to ensure that they have a clear visual hierarchy and appropriate use of whitespace.Garrett Dimon
When I follow this procedure my designs start to crave their own details. It becomes obvious what visual embellishments to use. You can see the impact that a certain color or font has on your overall design blueprint.
As a left brained designer, I can get pretty close to a finished design with just this procedure. Then I hand off the concept to a graphic artist to make prettier.
Comments
Bridget Stewart » May 29, 2008
I’ve not tried blurring a design before. I’m going to give that a shot and see how it influences my decisions after.
Thanks for the idea.
Brendan Cullen » May 30, 2008
My Intro to graphic Design teacher had us put all our projects up on a wall, stand back and unfocus our eyes to get an idea of just the flow/hierarchy.
I still use this trick, but I never thought to actually blur the design. Great idea
Danny Sedor » June 1, 2008
Like Brendan, I was also taught this technique but never applied it directly to the design as Josh suggest.
I intend to test this method on my current project. Thanks Josh.