At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Samantha Warren shared about her new idea: Style Tiles. Here are my take-aways:
- Design is art without clients – and in-house designers still have clients
- Creating 3 fixed-width pixel-perfect Photoshop comps encourages ‘Frankencomps’ – where client will request pieces of each to be put together to make a new comp.
- There is a better way to go about this, and it is ‘Style Tiles’
- Mood boards are too vague for clients to understand, although they are good for certain parts of the process
- Style Tiles
- Gives client an essence or feel for the website – fonts/colors/etc
- Allows for designing a system, not pages
- Separates style from substance (content)
- Are device width agnostic
- Will facilitate a conversation around responsive design projects
- Should come before a more refined mockup of pages
- Allow for quicker iteration
- Sets you up for creating a full component library – full of all possible design components on website
- Design Process:
- Listen
- Ask questions, get answers then setup kickoff meeting to get alignment on answers from all people on client end
- Ask what their 3 user goals are and 3 business goals are
- Ask ‘Why?” throughout
- Ask metaphor questions like, “If your brand were a ____, it would be a _________ and why?
- Ask degree questions like, “on scale of 1-5 how strongly do you feel your website should be______ (illustrative/etc)”.
- Interpret
- Identify common themes
- Get agreement on adjectives
- Begin pairing adjectives with design principles of line, shape, color, texture, space and form
- Define Visual Language
- Iterate
- Easier to do with style tiles
- Deliver a System
- System would include the style tile, component library (how all possible aspects of website will look, like, headings, lists, links, etc), and full comps
- Listen
- When someone says that designers JUST make things look pretty, a kitten dies!
- Design a better process!
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