Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Chapter 4. Using Style Tiles to Explore Design Ideas

A style tile (sometimes called a mood board) is a simple collection of images, fonts, colors and other inspiration to inform your design. The important difference between a sketch or layout concept and a style tile is its lack of structure; while a layout comp is meant to represent an entire page, a style tile is best kept simple. In a style tile, you collect elements that make sense for the project, shuffle them around, and see how they work. Style tiles are also meant to be works in progress; while the hope is that layout comps will only reach the client when they’re in good enough condition to be close to final, a series of style tiles can be shown to a client at early stages of the project, to gauge aesthetic preferences and make sure you’re on the same wavelength. They’re also great for fleshing out ideas, or keeping track of visual stories for future projects. Figures 4-1 and 4-2 are style tiles for the redesign of my studio website, currently in progress.

Figure 4-1. An initial style tile for tzk-design.com

Figure 4-2. A second style tile, with a different feel to it. After considering the two, I decided to build on the approach in this one, which I refine in Chapter 7

As you can see, this isn’t a complete layout as much as a ...