Design on a Dime

I’ll be speaking at BlogOrlando in just over a week and a half, hot on the heels of my vacation in Orlando this past week, whew. The plan is to discuss blog and social media design, in particular helping people understand design expense and finding some cool resources to spruce up their projects when time, budgets or size don’t allow for outside design assistance.

So what expenses am I talking about. Simply put - Money, Effort, Time and Quality. We all have to evaluate and weigh each of these with any product and determine where we have a resource deficit and where we may have an abundance. The reality is that many projects, particularly direct-revenue generating sites should involve professional designers at some level. These projects usually require an investment to offset all four of the long-term expenses mentioned above. However lots of other projects may not need this kind of attention. Those are the projects I’d like to concentrate on in my talk.

So You Think You Can Type?
Copy. But wait this is a design discussion right? Yes, but copy plays a huge part in all visual design, just ask Jeffery Zeldman. I’ll have some tricks for helping mock-up text, finding copy-writing resources and an inspiring site or two.

Are you User Experienced?
I’ve spent nearly ten years designing experiences for users, many of those years with a billion-dollare software company working directly with both users and engineers (I carried the specs to the developers so-to-speak). Users matter, even on the smallest, personal projects. I’ll provide you with some handy resources to get up-to-speed on who you’re designing for, how to design for them, then how to make sure these new users don’t hate you.

The Goods
Alright, I promised you I’d be providing some frugal tips and tricks and I intend to not let you down. here’s a list of categories I have in mind for free links, resources, templates, etc. If you don’t see something that interests you let me know in the comments on this post or drop me a line. I’ll have a special ma.gnolia tagset ready for these and you can save and share ad nauseam.

• Templates - Primarily Wordpress but I’ll see if I can throw you other folks some love
• Fonts - Everyone loves free fonts, and contrary to popular opinion there are a ton of free, high quality fonts out there. Maybe once you get hooked you’ll consider throwing some cash towards the fine folks at Veer.
• Testing - Sounds boring right? But if your site sucks in one browser you are throwing away viewers. I’ll provide some (almost)free resources for reviewing your projects, including HTML email clients.
• Grids/Layouts - Maybe you feel like an off-the-shelf template is cheating and want to muscle through designing your own, if so you’d better check out some of the many great articles out there about grids and why grids are good.
• Stock - It’s all out there: photos, vector illustrations, audio, video - just for the asking (and the occasional dollar or two). If you can’t find it in my discount list of resources you can always check-out the big boys and spend a bit more.
• CSS - Looking for some handy CSS resources, I have lots that’ll be happy to share.
• Inspiration - A list chock-full of the best of the web, or the best of the parts of the web I’ve seen. You’ll see stuff from friends, colleagues, people I’ll never meet and a few sites that look great but may be in Dutch or Japanese, I’m from Iowa I don’t know the difference.
• Odds and/or Ends - I’ve got a lot of just cool bits and pieces I’ll include (well tagged of course) in the link list as well.

Please share your thoughts and let me know if there’s anything missing or if this is something that interests you.