Wrestling with content

Wrestling with content for a course page still, but pleased that I managed to meet the initial deadline for the most recent stage of the design. I presented my work which I thought was a reasonable response to some of the ideas about what to do with the various challenges of an extensive page of information. It’s an ongoing process of seeing what content types there are across over 600 courses, and designing some templates that can cope with the inevitable variations.

A good example of huge variation of content is the entry requirements section of a course - it can be a small paragraph laden with dry technical info like the UCAS tariff and what GCSE grades would be needed or a much longer description of the process. Similarly, some courses have just two options when they can be started, others have very many more. It really does bring home how difficult (and essential) it actually is to model content, and be clear about it’s purpose.

Once the meeting was done it was to get to grips with some other content types on the page, and I found out that I like to copy patterns from other sites as a good starting point for my own ideas - I think I find that less daunting than incrementally building up a design pixel by pixel. On reflection. that mirrors my process when working in Illustrator where everything gets messier and messier until I reach a point where I think ‘I need to tidy now’ and my own ideas come through.