Last week in the studio (CW37-26)

We’ve been away from the studio for the past five weeks and on the road around southern Germany. Now, I’m back and easing myself into work with a new website design for an author.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been on the road across southern Germany, exploring the Black Forest and Bavaria. We finished our holiday in Alsace, on the border of France and Germany, and liked the area so much we’re planning to spend a month there early next year. It took a day and a half to drive back to the UK, and the forecast said it would be grey, but so far it’s been warm and actually sunny.

Designing for Jas Dosanjh

Now I’m back in the studio; my first job last week was to start designing a new website for Jas Dosanjh. She’s a Sikh-Punjabi author who writes about her life experiences as a woman from that culture.

Jas has written five books, with two more on the way, and has been working with a book jacket designer on a series of covers.

This means she already has a colour palette and typeface selection, but I needed to refine that palette and assign each colour a role.

Over a few days last week, I edited and organised Jas’ content into a small set of wireframe layouts, while thinking about how to make the most of her expressive book jacket artwork. I experimented with several options before we settled on a design which I’ll ultimately animate using CSS and JavaScript.

This will become an interactive banner with a modal overlay linking to pages where people can download sample chapters and buy Jas’ books.

Toward the end of the week, I switched to coding and began what I think will be a full week of technical development. I’m using Eleventy in a Box as my starting point, but I will need to build new modules for her book and events sections.

A new book: Standout designs for the Web

I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a new book, and during our holiday an idea started to form. Maybe it’s a legacy thing, I don’t know, but I really want to write about my design process and thinking, and why my designs look different from others. (Or so people tell me.) So I started writing.

Art Direction for the Web took over a year to produce and ran to over 300 pages. “Standout Designs for the Web” will be much shorter: a Hardboiled Web Design Shot, at around 100 pages, and there will be five sections:

1. What makes a website memorable?
2. Every business has a story worth telling
3. Designing with personality
4. Patterns are tools, not templates
5. Designing standout websites

I’m around halfway through the writing process and thoroughly enjoying it. I know that illustrating the book will take more than half the overall time, so I expect to have “Standout Designs for the Web” ready before my birthday at the end of November.

This time, I plan to self-publish it, then develop a series of practical tutorials and templates based on the examples in the book. It’s too early to go into too much detail, but expect to see more as the project develops.