So, with that in mind I went about re-designing this site with a content-first approach. Typically, when I’m designing something I think about how it will look. I think in terms of colours, layout, shape, textures, sizes. I’m a lines, licks and looks sort of person. I try to see the whole picture before I’ve even started, I have a preconceived notion of where everything is heading and more often than not this is where it will go. Something had to give, something needed to change… my whole process needed to change.

Process

This site design started as a simple, random article without any styling. Start Writing in your e-mail client and you’ll know what I mean. Just words, spaces and line breaks. Then I took each individual element of that article and decided how best to present it. I was forced to prioritise the information, to think long and hard about the place of each element within an article.

“Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.” - David Hockney

I’ve stopped trying to just make content pretty and instead focused on making content relevant. Why is this here? What is it trying to express? How can I best express it through design? This is basic stuff, this is discernment, analysis and evaluation, this is critical thinking! Nothing new to a good, classically trained designer but to be honest it was something that I had never really practiced before. I had always designed on intuition but I learned that intuition has limits.

Goals

To design critically you need to have clearly defined goals, These were mine:

• Try to ignore current trends, think timeless design.
• Clearly display and separate content elements in a way that is natural and relevant.
• Forget about colour.

Ignoring trends

Big glossy buttons, rounded corners, wet floors, extreme gradients, excessive drop shadows. The web 2.0 saturation point has well and truly hit us. I didn’t particularly like any of those design effects anyway. I wanted subtlety, minimalism, bauhaus style lines, these are design elements that look good and have always looked good, as it happens this fits perfectly with a content-first approach.

“The idea of trying to create things that last – forever knowledge – has guided my work for a long time now.” - Edward Tufte

Clearly separating content elements

The web seems a bit linear doesn’t it? Particularly, blog posts! I have read many a great blog post without so much as an italicised word. I hear you saying ‘but it’s all about content and the message’, well, yes you’re correct. The goal surely is to communicate a message, it stands to reason that a well defined structure and hierarchy will not only make the content easier to read but also make the message clearer. This was a hugely important goal for me.

Forget colour

I like colour :-) and it will make it’s way back into this site in time. Let me get the basics right first.

More to come

The rest of the site is ready to go but only the journal is being let out of the box for the time being.

There is a portfolio and a whole lot more still to come, I’m not actively looking for any work at the moment so I’m going to hold off releasing them. I want to get the journal out the door, build up some decent content and then concentrate on the other elements of the site.

I’d love to make a declaration of regular and quality content over the next few months but I don’t know if it’s going to happen. At least I’ve got a place where I can clearly and proudly express any thoughts that I may have.

That’s enough rambling for now!

Eoghan went Radioactive Green and The Menace has unleashed some illustrated goodness.

I’ve got a more modest face-lift, there are still lots of things that are missing but I was getting sick of the old design.

It’s not just a facelift, there’s some funky new stuff going on in the backend. Hopefully the new design will encourage me to blog a bit more regularly too.

I’ve moved everything to digiweb, so things will inevitably go through the ol’ DNS mayhem as my new server details propagate.

This has been one of those things that started in a conglomerate of enthusiasm and then fizzled out very quickly. Hopefully by putting it online it will give me the impetuous to actually finish it out.

I’m re-designing this website at the moment and I thought it might be a good idea to blog about some of the smaller features (featurettes as I like to call them) that I’m adding to the site so that I can share my thought processes with anyone who decides to read my blog.

I really liked Eoghan McCabe’s idea about having a very simple contact form (it’s a good idea to read that post first so you have a better understanding of what I’m talking about).

But there is one simple caveat to such a simple idea. This is how Eoghan describes it;

But here?s the rub, I broke from convention and so my poor visitors have been confused. And it?s entirely my fault too. Today I got two enquiries, but? neither contained any contact details at all!

Some Lateral thinking and…

Here is my solution, basically its a simple script will parse through the message and look for a phone number or an e-mail address. The script is fairly primitive in nature and not foolproof but it should work in 99% of cases, for example when looking for a phone number it simply searches for six consecutive numbers. Perfect? No! A client may be using six figures to portray how much he is going to pay me for the project (yeah right!).

The psuedocode looks something like this:

• if phone number (six consecutive numbers) not found
  • include form ‘would you like to add a phone number?’
• if e-mail address (’@’ character) not found
  • include form ‘would you like to add your e-mail address?’
• else
  • include ‘thank you’ form

An Example

Here’s an example of a possible real-world scenario. James wants me to give him a quick ring. I have met James briefly before but I have no contact details for him. James enters a brief message and hits send.

But wait, James has forgotten to enter his contact details. The little script will parse through the message and look for an e-mail address or phone number, in this case it will find neither so it will prompt James for both his E-mail Address and his Phone Number.

If James had decided to include his phone number and e-mail address then his message would send and he would not be troubled for information that he had already included.

Conclusion

It seems to get the job done without taking anything away from the simplicity and beauty of the original form and it fall’s in line with my motto of design that doesn’t make people go crazy. So it’s a decent solution for me. What do you think? Can the contact form be made more user-centric without losing its elegance?