This week’s lecture covered a lot of different areas, from the basis of all digital products; content, through user stories, which help us to empathise with our users and consider their needs, as well as being able to define acceptance criteria for our designs. To finally visual grammar a signature style containing typography, colour pallette and the key shapes that build up the visual product. A visual grammar can be applied to a product or a brand across multiple products and utilised effectively can offer a way to keep the visuals of a product or brand consistent throughout all visual implementations of it.
To try and get my head around content design and how to do it effectively, I got this book from the library.
Sarah Richards was involved in the redesign of gov.uk in 2013/2014 which has one design awards and is regularly quoted as a byword for great content design.
This book much like gov.uk does not use complicated visuals or fancy typography, it sticks with a black and white colour palette and uses different font sizes and weights to offer hierarchy and while it is very simple it works. You are clearly directed to what you need to know by the typographical hierarchy and it is easy to follow.
This has been the real skill in the design of gov.uk being able to make a large amount of sometimes complex information easily accessible and usable by a huge range of people. Anyone can need information on government services so the target audience becomes the majority of society and all the different abilities, digital literacy, reading levels and range of potential impairments that brings. To design content that can meet the needs of all those potential users is a real skill and Sarah Richards uses her learnings from this challenging task to offer the advice in this book.
This book was very easy to read, no doubt helped by keeping to the simple design language and content design format developed for gov.uk, and it packs a lot of very useful information into a quick read.
As well as this book, gov.uk has a website dedicated to their design system, offering a full guide on their design system to allow anyone to design in the same style as gov.uk. From looking at their design system it is a lesson in simplicity, but it also shows how much goes into creating a design system for a website that has to cover so much. They even have stated rules for the colours to be used in charts.
Source: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/styles/colour/ (Last Accessed 24/12/23)
Another interesting thing I found out while having a look on the gov.uk design system website was how they invite people to help improve their design system, from offering feedback to joining in online discussions and design workshops, you can get involved with the design of gov.uk and it’s components.
Source: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/ (Last Accessed 24/12/23)
All in all the book was a really useful read for me in improving my content design and the gov.uk design system page is one I have bookmarked and will use as a resource in my designs moving forward.
Auto-layout in Figma is a tool I have been aware of but in all honesty avoiding for a while, but I want to look at it more and see if it is something that I can incorporate into my workflow to make things easier and more consistent.
The reason I have avoided using auto-layout is in the past when I have tried to use it I have found it quite restrictive, not allowing me to move components where I want to and forcing me into particular positioning of elements that did not work for the design. I had a suspicion I must not have been using it correctly because I have seen it being mentioned online as a very useful tool, it happened that I was speaking about it with one of my classmates who had spent some time getting used to how it works and they were telling me that they think it makes a huge difference to how their workflow.
After this discussion I knew I wanted to look into auto-layout more deeply and see how I could use it.