The Web Designer’s Roadmap
This book comprises the following seven chapters. Chapter 1: Beauty, Creativity, and Inspiration By way of an introduction, I’ll explain the book’s broader concepts and establish the general terminology we’ll be using. The book’s ongoing project, Spectrumagic, is presented, where I’ll set expectations about what you’ll be learning. We’ll also look at the relevance of the study of aesthetics, creative processes, and where to find inspiration. Chapter 2: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over: A Bit of Design History Here, I’ll present a brief history of design and show how the design process has changed over the years. In particular, I’ll focus on the Modernist and Postmodernist eras to provide a context for the chapters that follow, as well as lay the groundwork for common design patterns. Chapter 3: Gathering Resources: That Rucksack Has a Lot of Pockets This chapter covers some practical lessons when deciding on the look of your design. It will include the discovery process, which involves learning from other disciplines, and resource gathering, which encompasses mood boards, color palettes, and storyboards. Chapter 4: Form and Function Now we’ll learn about assessing the structural and technical needs of a website and its design. We’ll look at the design’s purpose, and how to best communicate interaction and hierarchy. Areas covered are designing for multiple form factors including mobile sites, responsive design, wireframes, strategy, and content grayboxing. Chapter 5: Design Patterns: Tried and Trusted Solutions Programming design patterns are proven solutions to problems that arise while developing applications. Web design also has its share of issues. In this chapter, we’ll look at the most common design patterns, and possible use cases for when and how they should be implemented. Chapter 6: Conceptual Design and Our Color Project First, we’ll address conceptual design and how we arrive at a theme that informs the design process. We’ll look at a real-life example and cover topics such as designing the interface, art direction, and creative association. Then, we’ll delve into our Spectrumagic project, implementing what we’ve learned. Along the way, we’ll introduce the modern marvel that is style tiles and the notion of intuitive design. Chapter 7: Designing in the Wild Understanding the limitations of web-based technologies and how to overcome them is a necessary part of implementing designs. Often, a little knowledge ahead of time can help to shape a design and make front-end development easier. We’ll also examine progressive enhancement and look at some fancy tools and apps that should make your designing life easier
