The Ripple Effect in the Design Process
Published April 15, 2014 | Categories: Web Development , Creative Design
When I learned to paint, my teacher would always emphasize the importance of working the entire canvas at the same time. A lot of people have the natural inclination to zero in on the small area they are currently working on, and really develop it before working out to the rest of the piece. The problem with this approach is that a lot of time will pass as you work from one end to the canvas to the other, and your style will change with time. You hand will tire and get looser, the colors in your palate may not be mixed quite the same way, and you may take a break here and there and when you return to your painting, your flow is just not quite the same. So what happens is, you get inconsistencies in style and feel across the canvas leading to a touch of disharmony. The solution to this is to work the canvas in it's entirety from corner to corner at the same time. Lay in big chunks of underpainting, scatter those accent colors and highlights across the whole piece as needed when you have that perfect hue at hand, and keep your stroke styles consistent across the piece. This also allows you to plan out the space and layout better since you start to block in all the elements at the same time. As you work the canvas, you may add touches of a color in one area, and find that you need to carry that color across the whole painting in spots as needed to create unity and harmony.
A similar phenomenon happens during the design phase for websites. I like to call it "the ripple effect". Typically you have a starting design that then goes through iterations. Often these iterations are based on client requests for design changes. Perhaps that blue was not quite right, and they want it to be more of an indigo. Maybe their marketing team has decided to revamp the logo towards the end of the homepage design process. All these design requests may seem like simple isolated changes, but they have a ripple effect that creates a need to change elements across the whole site design. This is because, just like the canvas, the design needs to be worked from corner to corner at the same time in order to ensure balance, harmony, and to maintain an appropriate visual hierarchy between elements. That simple header background color change may then effect the color of the navigation elements and the border and gradients of a newsletter sign-up box. Then subsequently, the footer navigation links will need to be changed for consistency. Perhaps that new logo is a more subtle and diffused style, and now everything else on the page seems to overpower it. The only solution is to take the elements on the page down a notch so that the logo doesn't get lost.
It's important for people to be open to these ripple effect changes throughout the design process and to also consider how their design change requests may impact the whole of the design. Because they have such a large impact the design, it is important to nail down things like your logo design and color palates early on in the design process to ensure that their style is carried over into all the elements throughout the site.
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