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 good designer must be as artistically talented
as any "pure artist" who's never compromised his talent by working
on something practical. But in addition to that, a designer
should possess a rather unusual combination of skills: effective
project management, customer relations, proficiency in editing and
proofreading, plus at least some understanding of the customer's
business are all critical for success. Nothing is more
discouraging than a fashionable design hooked up to a text that was
obviously never re-read by its author. And yes, if your
customer doesn't seem to care about the consistency or the language
quality of the material, you should offer your help in this area
too.
Getting back to the Quiotix project, my first task in the stage
of implementation was creating a list of first and second headings
(see Fig. 10) for all pages of the site. Since this site
was redesigned rather than created from scratch, I didn't need to
work with the structure and distribution of information among pages;
however, I still needed to adopt the two-heading design of
Fig. 10 to the one-heading-per-page scheme of the original site.
Admittedly, it was only at this stage that I realized the
contradiction between the functional role of the headings on
Fig. 10 and their formatting. When I made that draft, I just
perceived the first heading as "major," "more important," and the
second one, as "minor" or "explanatory." Only when I compiled the
complete list of headings for all pages could I see that many pages
shared first headings, which thus served as a sort of "running
heads" for collections of pages rather than "major headings" for
separate pages.
In light of this, the first heading definitely looked visually
overemphasized---it had to be made less prominent. I reduced
its size and moved it to the upper right corner of the strip
(Fig. 11). Also, by Brian's suggestion, I moved the
navigation panel to the bottom bar, to allow for more "elbow space"
for the second heading at the top.
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Fig. 11: Making Form Follow Function |
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One might claim that this is not enough because the first heading is
still significantly larger than the second one---but the prominence
isn't always a matter of size. The position of the first heading
being pushed against the top edge (rather than centered on the space
allocated for it) already implies its subordinate role of a "running
head"; this is further stressed by its being a less contrasting
color and in lowercase, as compared to the all-caps second heading
colored black. An additional advantage is that the first title in
its new position balances the logo title on the left which is pushed
to the opposite (bottom) edge.
One more inconsistency that turned up at this stage was the name of
one of the company's products, QEWS, which is an abbreviation and
thus is always spelled with capital letters. At the same time, QEWS
had to be in the first heading (always lowercase) for a number of
pages. After some discussion, we decided to sacrifice, quoting
Brian, "consistency in design for consistency in product image." I
made the "QEWS" title, although in uppercase, appear as similar as
possible to the lowercase headings on other pages; as you can see on
Fig. 12 (and on this sample page), the "W"
and "S" are still lowercase, while "Q" and "E" are uppercase but
reduced in size (and somehow thickened).
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Fig. 12: QEWS and news, or On the relativity of upper/lower case |
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The rest of the story is mundane. I spent a couple more days
mincing the top and bottom graphics into a number of separate GIFs,
in the eternal struggle for a balance between graphic quality and
download size (I was aiming for less than 15 Kb of graphic files per
subpage, and I hit this mark with surprising exactness). After the
first HTML/GIF samples were approved, all I had to do is
cut-and-paste headings from the list I had compiled into my drawing
program (I use CorelXARA, by the
way) and invent a method for naming resulting files (with two GIF
headings on each page, I risked confusing things up without a
consistent naming scheme). When all was ready, I sent the entire
package to Brian who uploaded it all to www.quiotix.com.
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