Neatly Sliced

An Event Apart 2008, Day 1, 5pm – 6pm

Read the previous talk in this series, Designing the Details: Web-App UI Design Beyond the Basics by Jason Fried, or view An Event Apart’s Table of Contents

Underpants Over My Trousers

Andy Clarke

• A design related talk
• Comic book analysis- the transcripts of the comic from the writer
• “Final panel on this page, and it extends across the entire bottom tier of the page” – this is clearly a direction from the writer to the designer. This doesn’t happen anymore on the web.
• Don’t buy a CSS book, go buy “Understanding Comics”, to greatly influence web design.
• Eliminate the borders, and your eye extends beyond the normal bounds. In doing so, the reader will allow more time to read that block, as the amount of time to read a section of text (particularly with comics, the entire slideshow is comic screenshots) is bound to the size of the block that it is in, or without borders, it then extends to the boundary of your comic book or screen.
• How many divs for this?
• None. It’s a UL of news items. Code, replete with markup
• We can do lots of things inspired from comics to help people find their content. 
• Sort of break away from the grid approach, although the grid is still there, but just much more subtle. Looks less griddy.
• How do we draw the eye? Comics use speech bubbles. Web can use images. 
• We don’t build up suspense and drama for the web.
• Watchmen : pages 4 and 5 of slide PDF. 
• Kinda like splashpages. Forget what we used to think about them, they used to be front covers. No, instead make them front covers with content, explanatory and introductory.
• How much of your design process do you reveal to the client?
• Hardly at all. People don’t care about how, they just want to see the end result. That’s more a conversation you have with your peers more than you delve into with your client.
• Andy Clarke shows clients fewer Photoshop markups, he shows a working prototype.
• He deals with being a 1(to 2 to 3)-man shop by setting expectations properly in the beginning, so they don’t think you’re a 20 person company, and also have a good workflow and collaboration with the others in your setup.

View the next talk in this series: Special Adobe Session: Web Workflow with the Adobe Creative Suite by Adam Pratt, or skip to An Event Apart’s Table of Contents