Ryan Keberly Photography | Photo Notebook | Underwear
- Photo Notebook
Marc Nischan
Obligatory Baby Photos
Bombay Grille
Who Wants Cake?
Wounds of Sarah
Mannequins
Cats in Cages
American Landscapes I
Dramatic Animals
Color Experiments
Improv Inferno
Generations
Variations
Dan K
Animals
Xmas Postcards
Lawndale Market
No One Loves You
Images of Maps
MOCAD
The Regulars
Metro Times Arts Issue
Sky Covington
Detroit Street Trolley
- FEB
- 2007
Ryan Keberly’s information regarding design underwear
Underwear • SpouseNotes.com
Looking at yourself in your underwear is a good way to discover parts of your body that need improving—beer gut, love handles, what have you. So, why not do it with design?
I thought it would be interesting to look at my “design underwear” to discuss and dissect how Spouse Notes’ design has evolved over time.
Comments follow each screenshot.
Boring, plain and vanilla. Not much to get excited about. Needs more color — though I do like the “sn” bug as a design element.
Peach. Attempting to break up the grid by overlapping elements. Still lots of Clarendon… need to introduce some contrast within the typography.
Refined the peach palette into a more subdued treatment. Navigation and timestamp get a high-contrast treatment, introduced Gotham as a sans-serif contrast. Not so sure about the icons, they feel somewhat ironic/clunky in this layout. Might need more room for supporting text… the term “submit” seems a bit forceful. ¶ I actually built a working prototype of this design, but scrapped it in the end. It was too small and felt like a tiny floating box — even on 1024 × 768 screens. I did like the simple/delicate masthead. Dang.
Time to scrap the whole thing and start over. Trying to push the whole “Notes” idea into something more “bookish.” Added significant contrast to the color palette. Clarendon has been completely removed — with the exception of the SN bug.
Tried to push the design too far, it feels unbalanced. Seems more like a box-within-a-box-within-a-website.
Time to un-think things again. Back to a more monochromatic feel. Tried to emulate the jackets that 78rpm album collections come in.
Going nowhere fast. Back to a neutral palette with a tiny splash of red. Using a soft shadow for header/footer separation.
A jump to bold colors feels better. The project is supposed to be “fun,” the design should reflect that. The orange and blue are interesting without being wacky or distracting. That drop-down tab nav is a little too much though…
Here we go. “Submit” becomes “Share.” The all-caps Gotham and Clarendon are passable, not too offensive. Swap the orange and blue components, create a sense of heirarchy with the opacity. The 40px-tall nav bar condenses all the critical functions: previous, next, permalink, share, about, archive and home. ¶ The previous design’s navigation “hump” was inverted and used to connect the content area with the text “The Latest Spouse Note.” ¶ I re-introduced the wallpaper-y pattern into the new masthead to break-up the consistency of the color fields.