More redesigning

Oh gosh.  It’s that time again isn’t it.  Just a month into the release of my new site, I’ve taken my brand and extended it further. I guess this is the one thing that as a designer we all suffer… the never ending search for happiness (props to EAK for the link).

Then, having read a 24Ways Article by Meagan Fisher who insisted that Photoshop was evil and you can build your site fully in markup… I gave it a go and the current blog (not in the image below) was the output.

I’m not saying she was totally wrong… I’m just saying she’s either really gifted not to need the use of pencil + paper to write down her ideas super quickly.  It’s sadly not a gift I acquired.

Sure, if you’ve got a nice basis to work from which is really clean and concise then why not design in your markup.  However, I’ve found that my markup is best to ask Information hierarchy questions while the visual and graphic design side best done on paper or Photoshop.  How do you build a site?  Do you use just paper prototypes, mockingbird, photoshop or go straight into the final output using markup and CSS?  Should it be different for personal projects…?

What I did get out of Meagan’s post, was a really awesome app called Slammer – which enables you to use grids with suggestions such as the Fibancee sequance, the golden rule, uniformed grid and a few others.  Extremely useful and inspiring!  Go give it a try.

Speaking of which, it’s been fantastic to finally get back into the flow of using the Pho of GUI editing suites.  Having a break from it for a while was useful… but now I really feel like I’m back to full speed, adding in shortcut keys for all those annoying and monotonous clicks.  Oh it’s great to feel like an action per minute ninja.

Right.  Enough!