A blog post as a piece of art

I have recently discovered Paddy Donnelly’s blog, an irish UX designer living in Belgium : IamPaddy.com

What makes his blog out of the common ? Paddy is spending the time to design his blog post so they transmit a part of the message. He has accepted to share with us the process to create one of his blog post.

Lecteur français, vous pouvez trouver une version pour vous ici.

Inspiration.

I keep a Moleskine notebook with me at all times and jot down any ideas and thoughts I have for articles. Usually my topics are age old concepts (the page fold, spelling, minimalism) but I try and create a new spin on them. I try to make people think differently about these concepts and hopefully inspire them to open their minds with their own work.

Writing.

I always start with the copy. I usually have a vague idea what the design will look like and that often influences the copy in a later stage, but the copy always comes first. Locking myself away in Ommwriter with no distractions is the best way I have found for writing my articles.

Sketching.

Too many designers open Photoshop straight away without a general idea of how the whole creation will look. I always fully sketch out the article in it’s entirety, which can take a number of pages, and then once I’m pleased with the general direction I open Photoshop.

Photoshop as a publishing tool.

I treat Photoshop as a publishing tool, creating the layout to match my sketches. as best I can. Usually the design influences the copy so some things have to be changed, removed or added. This takes a long time and I usually scrap everything and start again and again until I’m happy.

Slicing & HTML/CSS.

Slicing up the Photoshop file and creating the HTML pages comes next.
This is perhaps the longest stage in the process. Little things always change here or there depending on my coding skills. It’s easy to go wild creating complicated things in Photoshop but it’s a different story trying to put it together in HTML so sometimes little things have to be left out or changed.

Publish

Then once I have read it over, and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, I publish it and send it out into the world. I tweet about it and then the article usually takes on a life on it’s own and works its way around the web. It’s fantastic to see people enjoying and tweeting about something that I’ve put so much work into. I make sure to line up my next article by choosing another idea from my Moleskine so that people are anticipating the next installment. This is also a good way of keeping me motivated in creating the next article.