You can ask me something too!

So, it seems to me that your specialty is layout. Your websites are quite nice. Even that most recent set of video clips from a recent trip was more about the layout of the clips than the clips themselves.

How much do you love thinking about layout? Do you have an active philosophy of design? How important do you think your skills are in the grander process of crafting the user experience?

Well thanks very much. I’ve never been told layout was my strong suite, but then again I don’t really break down design into categories when I think about it at first. I normally look at a design as whole, like how well one thing works with another, and work on those aspects without realizing it. I think all aspects are important, you can’t have a good design with just the right colors and bad layout, or vice versa. So everything is equally important.

Layout for me is the first thing that gets decided. How the page will be presented. For instance when I did SBLurl (which is just a re-branding experiment) I knew I wanted to keep the centered box, but the alignment was off, and things ran into each other with background colors. So I rounded the boxes corners, gave other elements bigger fonts and background colors so they could be easily differentiated from the main background, and basically evened out spacing between elements to make sure everything was clean cut (when working with spacing I like to work with even numbers, multiples of 5 for instance, a lot of designers do).

For me at least, I know I have a good layout when the layout starts to dictate what spacing amounts to use, then what fonts sizes are used, then what colors, and so forth. When the layout naturally flows into designing the other elements you know its working.

I don’t want to sound like I’m some veteran. I know and work with people much more talented than I, and who I have learned a great deal from. This possibly twisted answer is what I have grasped so far from designing for 3 years.