Here’s a little something for a Wednesday evening. (Or wherever day and time it is in your part of the world.)
The body and bottom of the next zeldman.com design are now finished. Tomorrow I start working on the top.
Looks extra sweet in iPhone.
I’m designing from the content out. Meaning that I designed the middle of the page (the part you read) first. Because that’s what this site is about.
When I was satisfied that it was not only readable but actually encouraged reading, I brought in colors and started working on the footer. (The colors, I need not point out to longtime visitors, hearken back to the zeldman.com brand as it was in the 1990s.)
The footer, I reckoned, was the right place for my literary and software products.
I designed the grid in my head, verified it on sketch paper, and laid out the footer bits in Photoshop just to make sure they fit and looked right. Essentially, though, this is a design process that takes place outside Photoshop. That is, it starts in my head, gets interpreted via CSS, viewed in a browser, and tweaked.
Do not interpret this as me dumping on Photoshop. I love Photoshop and could not live or work without it. But especially for a simple site focused on reading, I find it quicker and easier to tweak font settings in code than to laboriously render pages in Photoshop.
If you view source, I haven’t optimized the CSS. (There’s no sense in doing so yet, as I still have to design the top of the page.)
I thought about waiting till I was finished before showing anything. That, after all, is what any sensible designer would do. But this site has a long history of redesigning in public, and the current design has been with us at least four years too long. Since I can’t snap my fingers and change it, sharing is the next best thing.
A work in progress. Like ourselves.
[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, webdesign, css, code[/tags]
