So last week Ryan Sims and I presented at The Future of Web Design in New York city. Our presentation was about design process using a redesign of IMDb as the backdrop. It was a great time and a very nice event overall. (You can get a more general overview from Kevin’s post.) I thought I’d take a second and talk a bit about our presentation and the thinking/work that went into it.
Talking about process
Going back a few years now Ryan and I have both been part of the Design Eye panels at SXSW (and we’ll be doing one again this year – stay tuned) which have been very well received and pretty fun to do despite the extra work involved. When the folks at Carsonified approached us to do a “Mini Design Eye” we were pretty intrigued and excited.
The general premise of these panels is that you take a well known site and give it a make over. In the past these have really been about the reveal and showing the work that was done. And to some degree they will always be. However, Ryan and I began talking about it and we thought it would be nice to focus a bit more on the actual process involved.
Again, if you saw the talk last week, we still talked a bit about the work that was done, but tried to frame it in such a way that we could talk about process; things like tips, tricks, philosophy, etc. In some ways I wish we had more time to talk about the work and the process, as there was quite a bit of work that went into our talk that we didn’t get to share. You can only do so much in 45 minutes.
I think it went well, and since then I’ve received mostly positive feedback and have had quite a few good discussions about some of the things we said and talked about. Process is something that’s seemingly interesting to just about everyone, even if it is just a means to an end. As well, some of the philosophical bits we raised had lots of people thinking – which is good. I really wish we had more time for questions.
The deliverables
In any case, I promised I’d share some of the example deliverables I used. I want to make it clear, as I did in the session, that these deliverables were used to inform Ryan so that he could focus on what he does best. Each project has different needs and a different process and especially in the case of Wireframes, some deliverables can be tricky at best, useless or even detrimental at worst.
So view this with a grain of salt.
thanks for posting this Keith. I’m looking forward to the SXSWi panel now! This is some great stuff, the deliverables look nice and clean too.
btw, I love the dot grid books too… i think I spent way too much money on behance products recently. lol.
Great write-up Keith! I plan on referencing this post in the future at the day job. Extremely helpful in showing the value of advanced planning and research before “comping up a design”.
I also really enjoyed the talk and the fact that you guys did this in your spare time really drives home one of the points you guys brought up regarding speed, because even though this solution might be the “best” you guys could do given the time constraints, it’s a really good way to show you’ve hit the ground running. And that everyone should strive for that. :)
I downloaded the mp3 and watched the slides online. It was pretty interesting. My personal favorite is the new design of IMDB. It just rocks! It so much simpler than the original design, so much friendlier, so much more organized with focus on the important parts and feature of the site… wow. It just got one big problem: IMDB wasn’t the client :( Everytime I’m now using IMDB I get a small frustration shock: oh no, it’s still the old confusing wikipedia-like design! I really wish those guys at IMDB will check out your design and information restructure approach… Did you inform them about what you did? I sure hope so…