{"id":791,"date":"2004-06-30T22:48:36","date_gmt":"2004-06-30T22:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=791"},"modified":"2004-06-30T22:48:36","modified_gmt":"2004-06-30T22:48:36","slug":"design-epiphany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/791","title":{"rendered":"Design epiphany."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On a completely different note, tonight I was fiddling around with this design that I&#8217;d put together and my client had pretty much already accepted.  I&#8217;d found some stock photos, picked out some colors, and had started to merge those into the design, but I was feeling sort of <i>meh<\/i> about the whole thing.  I&#8217;d been working on this project for a while, and the design still wasn&#8217;t clicking.  The layout was fine, the colors were fine, the whole thing was <i>fine,<\/i> but it wasn&#8217;t <i>cool.<\/i><br \/>\nThen something snapped.  Specifically, one of my basic design principles. Anyone who&#8217;s familiar with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/portfolio\">my work<\/a> knows that I gravitate towards straight lines, grids, and lots of boxes.  Oh, yes, plenty of boxes.  This design was no different: boxes in the navbar, boxes holding the whole thing together, boxes boxes <i>boxes.<\/i>   In this design, I was going to put a wide photo in the middle under the navbar, kind of like the way <A href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\">Apple<\/a> does, but the page&#8217;s background was a very light off-white and the background of the photos were pretty much plain white as well.  The result: almost zero contrast, just a black outline holding the page middle stuff together, dividing white from white.  It looked awful.<br \/>\n<I>Snap.<\/I><br \/>\nI ripped out the boxes.  All of &#8217;em.  OK, well, maybe not <i>all<\/i> of them, but I traded in the boxes on the nav for staggered lightly-colored shaded areas behind each nav element.  The white photos are now floating on a white background, with a single gray line dividing the bottom of the photo from the content below, and that content is floating in the middle of plain white.  It sounds really stark and minimalist &#150; and it <i>is<\/i> &#150; but it&#8217;s also <i>beautiful.<\/i>  It&#8217;s reminiscent of the text you see sometimes screened onto the walls of a museum &#150; it&#8217;s really just plain stunning.<br \/>\n<i>Man,<\/i> I hope the client likes this.  I gave her an excited phone call at like 9:30 PM EST asking permission to explore this new design, and she granted it.  I&#8217;ve sent it on &#150; I guess I&#8217;ll find out in the morning.<br \/>\nKeep your fingers crossed for me, OK?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On a completely different note, tonight I was fiddling around with this design that I&#8217;d put together and my client had pretty much already accepted. I&#8217;d found some stock photos, picked out some colors, and had started to merge those into the design, but I was feeling sort of meh about the whole thing. I&#8217;d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-cL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}