Style Tiles: An Alternative to Full Design Comps | Webdesigntuts+.
We don’t talk much about the actual design processes we have in place, at least not in the detail we outline development workflows. Why is that? Are design processes just too personal that they can’t be explained in writing? Without diving too deep, I think there’s some truth to that, but I like the idea of what this author is calling Style Tiles.
As covered in the article, you often see interior designers using mood boards to illustrate their vision for a project, could something like that work in Web design where we’re moving further and further away from the static compositions that have gotten us to this point?
One of the hardest things to convey to clients during a kickoff meeting or design presentation is how the site is going to act, how it’s going to feel, how it’s going to respond when it ends up in it’s final context. Perhaps a tool like this could help with that?
Comments
I kind of like this approach. It’s almost like a merging of a design comp, the beginning infrastructure of designing your site’s styles first before styling the rest of the layout, and mood boards. I’ve been meaning to test out and/or incorporate mood boards for awhile now, so maybe I’ll see if mixing this approach and the moodboard approach found in the following articles in my next project can help. Thanks for sharing that one, Jonathan. …hopefully the below links won’t kick Akismet. 😛
boagworld.com/design/mood/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/why-mood-boards-matter/
I loved this approach and attended Samantha’s SXSW talk on it this year, so when a new project came in, I thought it was the perfect test case for it.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work well for me. Even though I presented a quite specific style tile to my client and he signed it off almost immediately, upon working on actual Photoshop comps, they decided they’d like a different approach.
I’m quite sure it’s not a flaw of the method itself, I just didn’t communicate it very well. Deep down I still think it’s a step to the right direction, just not the holy grail method just yet.