Designing with no content
Out of context: Reply #11
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- kelpie0
oh that'd be lovely. actual content up front and the knowledge that you can design and build with specifics in mind. Hardly ever, if ever, happens in my case certainly - one of the unfortunate downsides of this is that you have to adopt an approach where you design specifically to the fact that you CAN'T know what is going into any content area. This makes you disregard many elements which you know will be murdered and wont work when that variable is introduced. By necessity you end up with quite 'template' looking stuff. Other less obvious things happen, like (in web design certainly), you stop being able to comfortably align things *across* pages to make good use of space and grids in that way, because thing A is likely to be a completely different length from thing B which sits beside it, and this disparity will throw a bunch of other things you've spent ages mocking up right out of whack.
I doubt this applies to more 'campaign' based web stuff, or to some print stuff, as there is a far more pressing need for the graphics to come together in a pre defined space and way that communicates the 'message' more primarily, but in big content driven things I don't see where its realistic to expect all the content up front when that variability will be fundamental as the lifespan of the project goes on.
It kind of forces your hand in a way to design for unknowns, its a good skill to get comfortable with, but often it means subjugating your own desires to produce beautifully crafted, well considered elements, and focusing on design in a structural way, creating frameworks rather than cohesive 'wholes'.
I've actually written so much now I've forgotten what I was saying at the start, but anyway...