Mark Boulton

After being fea­tured by those lovely people at Styleg­ala and CSS Vault I thought it might be a an idea to give a bit of a decon­struc­tion of the design here at markboulton.co.uk. This post was also promp­ted by Narayan over at Eth­er­farm and his great post, “all this fuss over some measly boxes”

So, what I want to decon­struct is the pro­cess I went through to come to this design and hope­fully give some sort of answer to the title of this post.

Any blog, in my opin­ion, is a tricky thing to design. Whilst coup­ling this with the need for a designer to have an online port­fo­lio pres­ence, you begin to find your­self with quite a task on your hands.

I’d bumbled around, design­ing, redesign­ing, redesign­ing whilst drunk only then look­ing at it in the morn­ing and trash­ing it (we’ve all been there right?). This went on, ser­i­ously, for about 2 years with no real dir­ec­tion or iden­tity for my site. I then began a blog, mostly as a dump­ing ground for what i’m think­ing so I can look back and go “oh yeah, I thought that once, look how much i’ve grown” — you know, the usual navel gazing.

Then there’s the tech­nical side. I’d used MT for a good 18 months and was happy with it, sort of, until the spam star­ted rolling in. The thing about MT is, it’s great for a blog, but not so great for a port­fo­lio. That’s where EE stepped in. I’m not going to talk about that here though — i’ve talked enough about that already.

What i’d like to talk about is the design.

Defin­ing the audience

In my day job, I like to think I have a User Centred approach to the work I do (although i’m begin­ning to real­ise the dog­matic aspects of UCD and i’m kind of for­mu­lat­ing another, more agile, meth­od­o­logy which all be writ­ing about soon.) 

So, I think about Users all the time (I hon­estly do, i’m not just say­ing that). With that in mind I was begin­ning to think about the audi­ence of my site and they fall into four cat­egor­ies — Exist­ing cli­ents, poten­tial cli­ents, Journal read­ers and ran­dom vis­it­ors. Design­ing a site, know­ing that much about your audi­ence, really helps cla­rify your think­ing. With that in mind, I needed a site which appears busi­ness like and pro­fes­sional for the cli­ent half, but per­son­able and friendly for the journal part.

Not all cli­ents are web savvy

This is really import­ant, espe­cially amongst the extremely savvy Web Stand­ards Bri­gade. A lot of the time, cli­ents are not the most seasoned inter­net users. They don’t really care whether or not the site is delivered using CSS, XHTML, blah, blah. They really are all bor­ing acronyms to most people. What i’m say­ing is, I really had to think about poten­tial cli­ents and the lan­guage they speak — a lan­guage of profit and loss, sales and budgets, ROI and deliverables.

It’s about Craft

I then approached the design with a clear brief. I know my audi­ence and what i’m try­ing to say to them, but I need to make sure the design shows what i’m about as a designer. To make sure it embod­ies my design ethos and dis­plays my applic­a­tion of the craft.

If you’ve read my Biog, you’ll know i’m tra­di­tion­ally schooled in Typo­graphic Design and am a mem­ber with of the Inter­na­tional Soci­ety of Typo­graphic Design­ers and as such have a self imposed oblig­a­tion to uphold what the Soci­ety stands for. I try to do this will every design I produce.

At the moment I’ve got a thing about Hel­vetica. Maybe it’s the clean lines, or imper­sonal per­fec­tion which appeals. I don’t know, but I think it’s got the most per­fect lower case “e” of any typeface in his­tory, ever. Any­way, I digress. I decided early on that type would be the walls, floor and ceil­ing of this par­tic­u­lar build­ing. Typo­graphy will bind the con­tent together, the struc­ture would be com­prised of let­ters and a del­ic­ate heir­achy of head­ing, sub­head­ing, cap­tions and body copy, rather than col­oured shapes and photography. 

I was get­ting tired of the sat­ur­ated col­ours and the heavy, intric­ate graph­ics which are pro­lif­er­at­ing in the web stand­ards scene. There’s too much visual noise, way too much. I though “what’s the best way of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing your­self in this increas­ingly noisy space?” well, by being quiet.

btw. If any­one wants me to into more detail regard­ing the grid and typo­graphy, let me know and i’ll work on it.

Col­our as an edu­cated, informed choice

Col­our bugs me. How many times has a cli­ent asked you to make some­thing a par­tic­u­lar col­our because they like it? I wanted the col­our choice for this site to reflect an edu­cated design choice. Green works for me at the moment, it’s not my favour­ite col­our but that’s not to say it won’t change in the future, it might. But at the moment, i’m fine with it.

To con­clude

This isn’t a post aimed at people who don’t like the design. That’s fine, you don’t have to. What I hope I addressed was to explain where I was com­ing from, what my require­ments were and what they are likely to be in the future. Design­ing your own port­fo­lio site as a designer is always incred­ibly dif­fi­cult and it takes some will­power to sit on your hands and just live with a design for a good few months — which is just what I intend to do.