Last week in the studio (CW40-26)

Moonwalk Audio and I started talking about a new website design about six months ago, but our calendars didn’t line up until now. Plus, I made time to work on designing the PDF version of Standout designs for the Web.

Getting started on Moonwalk Audio

Moonwalk Audio and I started talking about a new website design about six months ago, but our calendars didn’t line up until now. Last week began with a kick off call where the team and I talked about their business, the website, and what they wanted a new design to achieve.

They have a cute mascot in their logo but little else to form a visual identity, so I spent time investigating typefaces, looking in particular at round, moon-shaped “O”s. Then, I made type samplers from my choices and narrowed the selection to two likely candidates which work well at display sizes and for small text.

Apart from black and white, Moonwalk Audio don’t have a colour palette. As much as I like monochrome designs, I knew their design would need extra colours, so I developed six new desaturated accents.

Meanwhile, I worked on their content architecture and laid this out on a set of wireframes to demonstrate how someone might move between pages.

By the end of the week I had a pretty good understanding of what Moonwalk Audio were hoping to see and the foundations for going about making it. We have a progress call early this next week to go over my choices and discuss a few creative concepts that I’ve also been tinkering with.

My new book: Standout designs for the Web

I finished writing the manuscript a couple of weeks ago, and last week I started designing the book in InDesign. This is the first time I’ve typeset an entire book myself but, so far, I’ve really enjoyed the process. Out of the frontmatter, introduction, five chapters, and conclusion, I now have all but the final chapter remaining to work on.

Before I started, I hadn’t realised just how complex some of the spreads would become. I had some of the web design examples already made, but I was missing many of the key images, especially in the inspiration section, and these took several evenings to make.

But while I was making them, a visual language started to evolve, so I went back over what I’d already made and updated the previous images with these new design details.

The PDF version should be finished this week and I’m really happy with how it’s looking.

While I’m designing the PDF version of Standout Designs for the Web, I also discovered that the spreads can make parts of my original manuscript redundant. But those words can still matter in a reflowable ebook. If you’re interested in the editing process, I wrote something about that too.