May 29

Blurry, Colorblind and Brilliant

“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.

About Josh Walsh

Josh Walsh is a Managing Partner at Designing Interactive. He's also an award winning designer, author and speaker on the topics of User Experience Design, User Interface Design and Usability Research. You can follow him on twitter at: @joshwalsh

4 Comments »

  1. 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.

    May 29, 2008

  2. 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

    May 30, 2008

  3. 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.

    June 1, 2008

  4. Taking off ones glasses and stand back from the monitor is as efficient and much faster :)

    January 4, 2009


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