For almost every one of our latest web design projects, I’ve explored a different approach to the initial website design phase. In many cases, to start a design I would go straight into making a detailed mockup of the home page after getting an idea of what the client is looking for. This has usually resulted a good outcome but it hasn’t given the client as much interaction in the design process as it could.
Using Style Tiles
Then I discovered Style Tiles. This method of doing smaller, quicker designs rather than one single time-consuming mockup has had many benefits:
- More options for the client. It is much more time-consuming to create multiple full site design mockups for a client to choose from.
- Separation of design elements from content structuring. It is easier to create a full mockup after having already made design decisions like fonts, colours, textures and buttons.
- Clients can mix-and-match different elements from the various style tiles. So if they like the fonts of one, colours of another, and textures of a third style tile, it is easy to combine these.
In the websites that I have created style tiles for, it has often turned out that the last design has been the chosen one, and if I had done the design the traditional way, the client would not have had the options and ended up going with the first design or a slight variation of it.
Designing SABC
The Resulting Mockup
