Simple Steps to Great Web Design

Friday, March 12, 2010 5:00pm
Presenters:
Matthew Smith – Squared Eye

Description:
Creating beautiful web design is largely a matter of mastering a handful of simple techniques. The best designs employ systems of color, contrast, typography, and white space to achieve hierarchy, balance, and rhythm. The rest is just ingenuity and creativity. Matthew will review dozens of great and nearly great sites, explaining how to raise the bar on your next design.

Definitions (let’s define them)

Web Design:
Official: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design
Squared Eye: helps content get stuff done – on the web

Content is extremely important – Frank Lloyd Right just designed the house on paper, and a bunch of builders actually built it. The thing that takes a design home is the content.

Great Web design: helps content get stuff done – on the web with pleasure
Where other places are zigging, you zag, find your niche – "Spank that niche!"

Simple Steps:

Everything starts with Knowing not the brand, but the client.
Blueskyresumes.com
They needed a whole brand upheaval, and not simply a website. It is important to really get to know them and understand their business and their brand. What do they do, and how can they do it better? (http://www.clearlycogent.com/)

You must know their Audience, and know their people. Get to know their business goals, know their audience. Find out all about them.

Know their content. You need to be sketching, doing IA, making framework that you’re going to be designing on. Make sure the content works and flows correctly. It’s one of the core elements that will take your designs from decent to great.

***The fire alarm just went off in the convention center, so unfortunately this session comes to an early close***