While at the Front End Design Conference we talked with Niki Brown (@nikibrown) about her talk “Design is in the details”. There are some real gems here from Niki, thinking about keeping the “big picture” in mind while you design and analyzing why you are doing the things you are doing while working on that design.

Julia Anderson: This is Julia from unmatchedstyle.com and I’m interviewing Niki Brown. She did a talk today at front end design conference about design is in the details. But you ended up changing it to design is in the big picture. Why did you do that?

Niki Brown: Because when I design I tend to get focused on the small little details that sometimes I really lose track of the big picture and when I wrote the talk it was just this list of rules and guidelines and I was like, wait, I’m even losing track of the whole importance of the design so I changed the name of the topic.

Julia: Kind of like the idea of standing back from your design and…

Niki: Yeah, just stand back and take a look at it like, wait I totally missed the marks…

Julia: Or also maybe you’re remembering your clients end goals instead of just obsessing over that typography.

Niki: Yeah, or that what letter press effect that I still can’t figure out.

Julia: Somebody’s going to teach you at the…

Niki: I know. I need to corner Megan Fisher when she’s feeling better and make her teach me how to do this.

Julia: Well, I thought your talk was interesting because you were getting back to the basics, also reminding us of, let’s think about the meanings behind colors and do you think a lot of designers forget to get back to those?

Niki: Yeah, I find that I forget the basics from time to time. I think it’s just really easy to get sidetracked into making things look good but you really have to think of why am I doing this. Why am I making this purple? Why am I making this blue? Why is this big? Because really those are the questions that clients ask you and if you don’t have justifications for your design decisions, what are you doing? It’s just opinion.

Julia: Well, I’d like to ask you also next, what’s exciting to you in the web right now, what’s your new thing that you’re working on?

Niki: The new thing I’ve been doing is — so I primarily do word press sites, I’ve been fighting Drupal it for awhile which is not fun and I started to work with Expression Engine which is yet another CMS but it’s really geared towards letting you have complete control of your front end code so it’s really kind of refreshing coming from a Drupal and Work Press background. Drupal is block, block, block, four block, block, block. Spitting out all these classes and you’re like, what the hell is this? And Word Press is the same with the classes it spits out but with Expression Engine, you have complete control over the class names. You specify them, the CMS doesn’t do that. So, you just have more control of your front end codes which means I’m a happier designer developer because I don’t have to deal with crap code that a CSM is spitting out. So that’s my new favorite thing going on.

Julia: So you’re suggesting that to web designers for their…

Niki: Yeah, it depends on if you’re a small site like blog and static pages. That’s probably Word Press but if you have a site that’s got a lot of information that has — Drupal has the CCK where you can make the custom fields for everything and Expression does that as well but it’s just a lot easier for me as a designer to wrap my mind around.

Julia: All right, well, thank you very much.