My portfolio: 2. Inspiration
Once I had an idea of the information structure I wanted for my site, I needed to consider the look and feel for the experience. So I turned to inspiration. Where do you find the inspiration for your designs?
Now I’m not the greatest when it comes to graphic design. I love sites that look graphically intense, but for my site, I seemed to be leaning toward a more simple structure and design.
GENERAL GUIDANCE
Ultimately, I figured that I wanted my site to be straightforward, have limited graphics, and mainly black & white with very neutral colors.
After establishing the guiding rule, and always keeping the information from the previous article in mind, I looked for inspiration in music, colors, site style, and other sites to help me figure out what I wanted my site to look like. (Note that these are not in any particular order. I shifted back and forth among all these. When it comes to inspiration, I let the creative juices flow naturally.)
MUSIC
Yes, I listen to music while I design. I will typically find music that “goes” with the project. For example, when redesigning a site for a group that organizes Mexican folk dance conferences, I listened to Mexican folk music. Of course, it helps that I have some of that style of music in my library.
If you don’t have much musical variety in your library, I recommend using Pandora, a free subscription site on which you create a “station” of the music or artist you like, and the site plays music that is similar in style. Amazing work there.
For my simple, straightforward site, I chose music from the 80s: I created a radio station in Pandora called ‘The Promise,’ because it is one of my favorite songs from that era. My theory was that pop music in the 80s was very easy to listen to, straightforward, and clean. I might be biased here, but this was my inspiration. In the end, you go with what works for you.
COLORS
For the color scheme I chose: BLACK, WHITE, GREYS, & BURNT MAROON. The black, white, & greys because those colors automatically indicate simplicity to me.
Choosing “burnt maroon” requires a bit of explanation. I needed a color for titles, headlines, and links, so I wanted these to be consistent and needed them to stand out. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, whose school color is Burnt Orange. I have family who attended the rival school Texas A&M University, whose school color is Maroon. Ever the harmonizer that I am, I chose a color that fell between these two: burnt maroon.
Final swatches for my site.
STYLE
Around this time, I was also coming across a lot of online articles about using grids to guide a design. Not being a trained designer (something I should have explored as an undergrad), grids were a godsend! I won’t explain it here as it can take a lot of room. I’ll just provide links to some of the articles that I used specifically for my site.
OTHER SITES
And as all my initial research includes, I wanted to see what others in the blog/portfolio world were doing in terms of simplicity and grids. Two that I drew inspiration from include the ones that published the above articles.
Notice their use of whitespace, simple black and white feel, and the grid layout that helps bring a sense of order to their sites.
Subtraction.com Khoi Vinh's Website
Aisle One: Inspiration for Graphic Design
So that was the general gist of stage two for me. The next step is when I sit down and actually begin to draft out the design for my site, combining the efforts of INFORMATION GATHERING and INSPIRATION.
Tags: basic article, colors, design, grids, inspiration, Methodology, music
April 8th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
[...] my laptop, my notebook full of sketches / scribblings, and a cup of coffee. As I mentioned in the article on free tools, I set my Pandora station to the type of music that I think “goes” with the design. [...]