I was reading The Designer and the Grid last night. I had some vague awareness of this area of design theory, but hadn’t delved into any real detail. I saw a great talk earlier in the year by Andy Clarke that made me realise I should really do some reading in this area.
I think I tend to work mostly from a visual / aesthetic point of view when carrying out design work. Another way to approach it is to decouple laying out content in the most appropriate way, from the visuals layered on top of this. Where I’m interested in grid theory is around this first step – using various grid configurations as faded layers in Photoshop or Illustrator to provide structure around the initial step before visuals are even considered.
I guess I tend to jump directly to the fun, high impact stage, and sometimes this means there is insufficient structure around how the content is presented.
I’m also playing around with ideas about the best way to convey or test pure content layout. This can be done in a flat way with Visio or Illustrator, but I think you can get better feedback using a simple interactive model that allows you to click through a particular scenario. I like the idea of using static html pages with very understated greyscale CSS, and maybe combining this with Wiki style content that can capture notes around the design, or feedback from others.
Then again, maybe I’m just trying to avoid writing spec documents in Word. I was reading an article from Joel about that whole subject, and it made me realise I should make an effort to embrace the word processor a little more than I do.
