A Small Taste of Design (Remodeling Dynamic Diagrams)

By Tim Roy

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
- Thomas Hardy

It has been a week since an update on the redesign of the Dynamic Diagrams website, but work has been progressing steadily behind the scenes. Kirsten, the lead information architect on the project, has worked with the team to develop a solid set of functional and business requirements which have gone through several reviews. With requirements now final, some slight changes have been made to the information architecture of the site itself, although the emphasis remains on the overall design.

One of the steps in creating an information architecture. Our site did not require this many Post-Its!

Wireframes are also complete and so the work has been turned over to Matt, who is the design lead. It is not an enviable job, designing for a group who spend their days fully focused on all things visual. Matt’s first decision was to use “web fonts“, an emerging standard that allows us to employ our company standard, Meta, without having to use (or maintain) image files. This provides us with a tremendous degree of flexibility while still allowing us to create a consistent look and feel for Dynamic Diagrams.

A sample of Meta

Matt has produced a first draft of a design style and has received feedback from the working group. This will result in a second version that will be presented to the entire Dynamic Diagrams staff sometime next week. Despite the tough audience he will be facing, Matt can be assured that we will provide him with useful feedback (as opposed to the “I’ll know it when I see it” or “looks good, but can you make it blue?” nightmares that haunt all design professionals). As reported earlier, the biggest change will be in providing a far wider and deeper range of work from our portfolio and Matt and Kirsten seem to have that well in hand.