Well I’m back. I’ve just had a lovely 2 weeks in Javea, tanning up on the Spanish coast, and now I’m pumped up and ready to go. I’ve been filling myself with ideas from the book ‘Getting Real’ by 37signals and I’m secretly quite proud of how much of their ‘Real’ philosophy we already follow at Netbasic.
From a design perspective, the most interesting idea I’ve read about is ‘Epicenter Design’ – Start from the core of the page and build outward – and it makes so much sense. If we were manufacturing a car, we wouldn’t craft a sexy outer shell and then try and mount the engine inside. That would force us to limit the performance of the car. Or hack a nasty hole in the bonnet and patch it up later. We’d decide which engine we were going to need, then design the sexy outer shell around it. So that means two jobs done in the right order and three jobs if not. Proof that designing the engine first is the right thing. But in a website, what is the engine?
It could be two things. To a developer, the engine could be the database or even the framework. But to a designer perhaps, the part of the page that people use the most is the engine. Not the header or navigation (though these would be used a lot), but the bit of the page that is the reason the page is there. The bit that if missing would render the page useless. The car stationary. And no-one getting anywhere fast.
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