Over the summer I went on placement at digital design studio Numiko based in Leeds. I initially went for a week but this ended up turning into a five week placement which I found extremely beneficial to my practice and it solidified in my mind that working in the digital space is something that I want to do. At the end of the placement they asked me if I would like to return on day a week for the rest of the year. I accepted the offer as I thought it would be extremely relevant for me to work there one day a week for a year as it give me a professional skill set to run along side the creative skill set that I will be developing in my final year at university. Therefore as the briefs I am undertaking in my third are essentially all digital, the skills I will be learning and developing at Numiko will only enhance the work I am producing as part of my extended practice I therefore think losing one day a week of university will ultimately benefit my practice as a whole. I had decided to keep this diary of my experience as Numiko for a number of reasons firstly it will allow me to publish the content into a printed publication which I can the submit as part of my extended practice which will mean the time I am loosing from not being in the studio at university will not be completely lost. Additionally I also think it will prove to be intresting to see how the two types of learning I will be engaging with in the form of Numiko and University influence each other and overlap in aspects. The diary will act as a record of the many projects I will be working on at Numiko as well as the skills I have learnt and developed and finally I will linking to relevant articles and works that relate to the comments I am making.
Week 1 - Baseline Grids for Web
My first week back after finishing my placement, I was certainly glad to be back into the studio, it had been three weeks since I was last there and felt out of the loop so I wanted to get up to date with how the projects i'd been working on had moved forward. Thanks to a studio restructure I now have my own desk alongside the other designers in the office which means I can work more closely with them as well as learn from them through shadowing there practice more so now than I could have when I have sat away from them in the studio. The work day was fairly fast paced and I worked on two of the projects I'd been working on over summer, WaterAid and Design Council. The main piece of work that I worked on today was rolling out a baseline grid across the three digital formats of the Design council website, Mobile, 1024px and large. The way in which Numiko work is that they produce the designs for the website across three different sizes, the mobile version, the 1024px version which is for laptops and iPads and the large version which is for desktop use. They employed a baseline grid across these designs to ensure consistency across the design from both a aesthetic and development perspective. Using baseline grids is something i've been familiar with in print work and working with InDesign however I hadn't really come across it being using for digital work and in the production of websites. This was a interesting new way of working for me, producing a website across a consistent baseline grid. My job was roll out all of the design across the altered baseline grid which had changed from an 8px baseline to 6px baseline. In terms of responsive web design it's essential that websites are no produced on a baseline grid to ensure content scales and is responsive to the initial designs. I will be pulling the technique and way of working into my own work when producing work for digital outputs.
Links
Jason Santa Maria: Baseline Grids on the Web
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