Written on 8/1/2014 in Web development
The design iteration is quite ... How should I put it ... full of changes. It's common knowledge in software development that 'change is the only constant'. But when designing, change has a different meaning entirely. It's very subjective and that's why it's so difficult to keep structure while changing design considerations. Changes in design are mostly bound by feelings and in my experience, it's very common to end up with the opposite of my first idea's.
Prioritize
You also need to set priorities. And it's not all black and white. For instance, design might be the lesser of it's two brothers structure and UX. Like mentioned in a previous post, UX is a very important aspect of almost everything and I'm trying very hard to implement The Vorpal Blog in a UX friendly way. But in websites these things often go hand in hand. When making structural changes, you have to keep the design and UX in mind. While making design changes, consider the impact on UX and the structure.
In Belgium when someone doesn't want to eat food without even tasting we have a tendency of saying 'Don't eat with your eyes!'. Meaning that you should always taste first and judge later. In websites on the other hand, the eyes are the taste buds. Speaking for myself, when a website looks outdated or ugly, I won't read it myself. So, sorry when you're reading this while you find my website appalling, but you're probably the unicorn in the room.
Design is hard
But how do you make something 'beatiful' and 'clean' as a developer without design experience. Sure, you can get bootstrap and your website will have a slick looking cool responsive design. But it's a framework, and often enough, I've implemented it and wasn't very happy after a while. I didn't like making changes and how I wasn't using all of it. I also went through some problems with compatibility with JQuery UI. But this is no rant about Twitter bootstrap because it does everything it's supposed to do and quite good as well. You can set up an amazing layout in record speed, making rapid development that much easier.
Still, I felt limited by the power that was given to me by those frameworks while they should actually enhance me. Perhaps it's the lack of knowledge but coming up with an original idea is easier when starting from scratch then starting out from a base idea. That's why I like my tech raw and without the fat1. Because when you want to do something original2 you will always have to get your hands dirty. And if I do need to get my hands dirty, I'd rather do it in my own dirt. Without specific cheats to overcome a framework's weak spots. For the basic layout I'll just use plain old HTML and CSS. I might add some functionality later on with javascript to brighten it up a bit.
Finally, some results!
The layout is kept minimal, because that's how I personally like it and everyone should like it too. But not only for that reason. It's also because it's easier3 and keeps the focus on the information. For the result, well, you're reading it. I won't be changing much in the near future. Oh, the coloured blocks on the sides are newer, so imagine the website without them. I will be talking about these blocks in one of the next posts.
That's it. More next post.
-- UPDATE -- Well, I just found my first UX flaw, and it was found by the gf. She was browsing the blog because, well, I forced her to. And she was looking at the list of posts. She clicked the topic name instead of the post title to get the post. I asked her why and she replied.. Well, I thought the post title was always below the topic. And she's bloody right!
In a post, the title is organised:
TOPIC NAME + DATE
POST TITLE
In the post list, this was organised like this:
POST TITLE + DATE
TOPIC NAME
This is actually against one of the basic design principles4: consistency. This update was only to illustrate how an easy and unnoticable problem can be avoided by following some basic principles.