So, this past Saturday I designed a new site, Clay Street Media, for the parent company of VidSF (which I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet), it’s in the portfolio now, etc. More importantly, it has inspired a rare Long-Form Post, which follows.
This is the first site I can think of in a while where I mostly designed on autopilot, resorting to a bag of tricks I’ve been building lately with each of my recent design exploits.
- Helvetica Neue for sans serif, Georgia for serif. Helvetica Neue is very similar to Helvetica but is made for screen viewing, and the few times I’ve compared the two I thought Neue looked ever-so-slightly better.
- A general aversion to bold type. I’ll typically emphasize text with a slightly higher-contrast color rather than use bold, though recently I’ve been growing fond of bold Helvetica Neue. In short: for Georgia, italic is nice-looking, bold is ugly. For Helvetica Neue, bold is nice-looking, italic is ugly as it doesn’t seem to be a true italic.
- Obnoxiously huge one-sentence intros. It’s never a good thing to show up to a website and think “Hmmm, OK, what’s all this about then?”. So I try to make it easy by summing up the entire project in a single sentence and by making that the first thing that is seen.
- Tiny section headers in a contrasting type style, that poke out a bit to the left to ease scanning and break up an otherwise monotonous uniform left margin.
- Usually flat colors and type with very minimal imagery. Though this is usually more due to time constraints than to a fear of imagery. The site you’re looking at right now is, of course, an exception, and its current incarnation is two years old.
Are these useful tricks? Do they typically enhance the site’s effectiveness? I think so, yes, but it’s important not to resort to the same old tricks time after time. There’s a great bit from The Creative Habit (which I highly recommend to anyone who makes things for a living) where Twyla Tharp writes “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” It feels good to practice what you’re already skilled at, but when something is mastered, it’s time to move on to something new, however difficult that may feel, and however fearful you may be of making mistakes in public.
For my next project I’m going to use imagery, perhaps break up an otherwise-orderly grid with something like our friend the owl there. And a new typeface I haven’t used much, maybe Gill Sans or Times. Or maybe go wild and try out sIFR. And maybe I’ll let the user figure out what the site means to them, instead of screaming at them what I think it should be. Because if I’m not trying anything new, I’m not going anywhere.