This website is a wrapper for my creativity, but it’s an exercise in creativity in and of itself too. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and I think it might be interesting to delve into the considerations that led to my design decisions…
I’m a big believer in stylistic choices being consciously tied to an understanding of both the communicator and the audience of a message. At the same time, though, I love explorations of style on a more intuitive level. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the distinctions between style and substance, the way style is a metaphor for an ineffable constant; just as it’s important to tailor a metaphor to the receiver, it’s also important as a creative to go on instinctive journeys and only later inquire into why we were drawn to our decisions. In other words the right vehicle for one message may not be right for another, and to develop the skill to recognise what is right for any situation I need phases in which I follow a feeling without blocking myself with thought.
What this comes down is that I am not striving to be a practitioner of a single style: my focus is on developing my understanding of how style itself brings us closer to the source. For my website, then, it’s important that the overarching style is as compatible as possible with the varying styles of the work within it — communicating the fundamentals of layout and hierarchy without giving an initial impression that boxes me into a corner.
So, how to strip back stylistic choices that beget particular directions? The obvious first step is to strip away hue and work with only black, white, and tones thereof. The basic need for comprehensibility mandates significant contrast between elements, meaning either light on dark or vice versa with little room for mid grey. I’ve used dark on light for the bright, fresh feel. Pure black on white is very stark, though, and subtly raising the black to a dark grey tone avoids harshness while keeping things crisp, moreso than using a light grey tone instead of white.
Light on dark would work too, but — despite probably being the most ancient style of inscription — it feels like more of an explicit choice because of the ubiquity of dark on light in most media. If the desire is for the stylistic choice to be invisible, then dark on light is the way to go.
Continuing the pursuit of invisible choices, I chose Inter as the typeface. An unassuming neo-grotesque sans serif with personality formed through uniformity, not an individual quirk, to the casual observer it is easy to overlook as a ‘default’ typeface — but has more beautiful proportions than system font sans serifs and is less subconsciously recognisable than Roboto or Helvetica. With great proportions for both header and paragraph copy and a variety of weights, it’s an ideal site-wide choice.
The simple dividing line between header and content gives the two elements context without drawing excessive attention in the way that an inverted light on dark scheme for the header would. Heavier weighted fonts are reinforced as links, as is boxed content; in the absence of colour, it’s important to establish how to intimate interface elements. The boxed buttons and the outlines of posts on the collections page have almost indistinguishable corner rounding, for the same harshness-assuaging reason as using dark grey instead of black.
Dynamic elements can be the death of many good design intentions, and I find it important to scope the extent to which there will be unpredictable changes in layout as an initial step to ensure they are mitigated in the original plan. Imagery slots easily into the site when the design choices get out of their way, and by giving posts in the collection page room to breathe in their boxes there is aesthetic harmony for each post regardless of the length of its title.
The small details are where things come together. The aforementioned subtle tweak of black to dark grey, adjusting tracking and line height of the fonts at different amounts depending on size and weight to improve aesthetics and readability, and implementation of CSS techniques that fix line length and balancing to maximise legibility and avoid orphans.
I could go on for days dissecting the justifications for the design decisions that went into creating this site. The resolutions to changes in layout between desktop, tablet, and mobile, the implications of page load time, the consideration of audience and future plans. A huge part of what I love about design and creativity is the infinite capacity to go not only wider in an approach, but deeper.