Personally? I figure out what font sizes I need and how wide the
paragraphs should be to be readable, etc. Then I do a screen capture
and bring it to photoshop, where I more or less play tetris with it till
its in an arrangement that fits the project and flows well. Think ahead
especially at how the user is going to have to get at things on your
site to be sure it's intuitive and makes lots of sense. Then, when
you've got things arranged, squint at it a bit to be sure everything
still makes sense.
Then I work with a gray-scale pallet to figure out what should go in
lighter tones and what can go darker. The point is that the page has to
flow well and look good in grayscale as it does in color. I was pretty
pleased with myself when Cameron Moll suggested the grey scale thing
recently when talking about great design. :-) He added one more test
to this - try applying a blur to the entire thing and see if the most
important info is still obvious. (It's what I try to accomplish with
squinting)
Once you've reached that point, you've got a fairly good design going
for you. Bring on the color. If I've got any focal image I pick from that.
HTH,
Velda
Nathan Lane wrote:
I think that I have down some good techniques for programming backend,
content management, and I can handle flat-file and DBMS databases. I also am
very good at AJAX, CSS styling, and XHTML strict writing. BUT I lack in
skills needed to design the layout and interface, not that I can't program
almost anything anyone gives me, but I want to be able to give myself
something. At this point, I have my own very minimal website -- and I don't
keep it up to date, because all of my data is hard coded in XML files
(basically I have developed an online method for adding content yet).
Anyway, sometimes I'll go over to DeviantArt.com and look at people's web
layouts to get an idea, but where does everybody get their own ideas? I
would appreciate any direction, especially for my personal web site -- my
goal is to sell myself as a web programmer, software QA engineer, and
application programmer.
Thanks.
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