Design Journal #4 - Foothold For Design

During a simple conversation with a Sabrina, a fellow Studio member, I finally got the Ah-Ha moment that I was looking for. I should have known that it was going to be a special day since I decided to break from the norm and move to a seat different from my norm. While Sabrina and I were conversing, I so happened to look up and see a picture of an old calendar and then it clicked! I wanted the front of my web page to resemble a calendar to include the different months of her first year. This was the breakthrough that I was looking for. I immediately began searching on the web for ideas and found a scrap sheet of paper to begin scratching out some details. I felt that it was the push that I needed to initiate the process.

Well, since that time, my design has changed, but in a good way. I sat down with Sabrina and Sean (another Studio member) to critique my project. They both made a great point in that the initial calendar design and the background were contradicting each other. Sabrina mentioned a beautiful ornate frame. From that comment I pictured a wall full of beautiful frames in which someone could browse over the frames and be taken to the scrapbook page of that particular month. From the words of Gal, design is similar to “a rock climber (who) knows that she wants to get to the top of the mountain. She chooses a route for the climb based on her knowledge when she is at the bottom of the hill. As she climbs, she constantly faces new situations where she needs to choose a new footing to proceed.” (217). Since I had a clear idea of what my project was going to exhibit, I had to think of how to get there. I first chose the calendar look, I incorporated a flip notebook, now I am on the wall of frames example. “Each foothold is both an endpoint that sums all the steps she has taken so far, and a point of departure from which to plan the next one.” (217). As I continue on this path of a better design, I too have to resemble a rock climber in that I have to “ continuously face a challenge of making future decisions based on the here and now.” (217).

“The process of design evolves as a process of identifying emerging new questions to address.” (225). I had to address the question of navigation, which I had not thought of during my calendar design. I now have an idea of how I want others to interact with my page. With the ideas of using a frame, I can introduce and explain the website in a beautiful ornate frame in the middle of the wall. Or, if I have time and am adventurous, I could use flash in a way that incorporates the frame idea as well. Then, when a user scrolls over each frame, it can create a rollover explaining which scrapbook page it is linked to. Just now, I thought of incorporating a hanging bookshelf with a book that the user can click on and view the scrapbook in its entirety.

I don’t foresee myself changing the design of the front page again. As Gal states, “I stuck with it because I felt good about it.” (224). I am excited with the concept and what I can do with it.

Next steps:

• Continue creating scrapbook pages. (Thanks to the addition to my RAM memory on my laptop, it will make my time with Photoshop much quicker).
• Continue working on the front page.

Resources:

Gal, S. (1996). Footholds for design. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 215-227). New York: Addison-Wesley.