The Style Archive: For Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal

This post is the final in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Today we're speaking with Liz Lubowitz, whose theme, The Late Show, was the overall winner in The Style Contest. Liz also won in the "Sports and Recreation" category with her homage to baseball, The Road to October.

Q: What is your design background, and how did you get into design?

I started designing by complete accident about four years ago, mostly due to a university roommate who used to sleep really late on weekends. I started going to the computer lab so as not to disturb her in the morning and stumbled upon one of those free site hosts that come with atrocious WYSIWYG interfaces for putting together a website. Naturally, I thought it was quite brilliant at the time and quickly started creating page after useless page. It was only after another friend introduced me to blogging as a way of keeping in touch with her that I decided to learn HTML and CSS so that I wouldn't have to use one of the hideous default layouts the blog site offered. Designing for my own blog eventually snowballed into starting my own blog templates site, and although I no longer have that site it gave me copious amounts of practice in something that had been largely self-taught through reading everything I could get my hands on. I worked freelance while I was in art school, although haven't been designing as much since graduating last year.

Q: Tell us about your approach to the design of your winning style.

"The Late Show" was the ninth template I designed, although I only ended up submitting five in the end; the rest are lying in various states of unfinishedness on my hard drive somewhere. I'm a big fan of going to the movies and I knew that I wanted to make at least one movie themed style. I kept thinking of those old revue cinemas with the marquees out front, 1930s chrome all over the box office and concessions stand, and plush red velvet curtains and upholstery, and this served as the inspiration for the template at a very basic level. I kept the colour scheme but didn't want to rely too heavily on movie-related imagery beyond the box of popcorn, assuming that anyone using it for a movie blog would probably also be inserting much of their own imagery in the way of movie posters and production stills. Of all the layouts I submitted, this one was far and away my favourite, so it gave me an extra jolt of excitement to see that it had won.

Q: What kind of response have you received from people who are using your style?

To tell the truth, I haven't seen any of the responses other than what was on The Style Contest pages!

Q: What has been your experience designing styles for TypePad, Movable Type, or LiveJournal?

MovableType was the first CMS I ever loved and designing for it was no more difficult than designing for something simpler like Blogger. MT was more flexible, more robust, and had way more tags than I could ever hope to use, but once I had structured my templates the way I wanted them, all I had to do was change out the style sheets occasionally and I'd have a completely new design. I had a trial version of TypePad about a year ago but could never get into it design-wise after having worked with MovableType previously.

Coming to LiveJournal was a lot tougher from a design perspective. I had originally signed up for the service for the sole reason of learning how to design for it, but I found that its template system was way more complicated and alienating that I could have imagined. Everything that would happen server side in MovableType is stuff that you're expected to know how to code for if you actually want any level of customization in your layout, and that didn't sit well with me: I want to design, not program. There have been a couple of user-designed layouts released in the last year or so that enable users to link to an external style sheet, and being able to play exclusively with the CSS without even so much as looking at the LiveJournal templating code has made my life infinitely easier when it comes to designing for this system.

Q: Tell us about your current design work and projects.

Right now I'm taking it easy with design work because I'm working full-time for a not-for-profit arts organization. I'm mostly designing for myself these days, but I write a lot of tutorials about designing for LiveJournal because huge segments of LJ see design as this impenetrable fortress that they can't possibly break into. There are a ton of talented graphic designers on LiveJournal and such a huge potential for great design, but the people's fear of the template system holds them hostage and prevents them from really pushing themselves. We have a small project based loosely on the CSS Reboot that encourages and challenges LiveJournal users to think outside the box and push themselves towards designing something fantastic and it's been very positively received so far. I'm very proud of how it's turned out so far and I'm glad that more and more people are thinking about designing for LiveJournal.

Q: Where do you find design inspiration? Who are some of the designers that inspire you?

It might be odd to say, but I rarely look to other web designers for inspiration because I just don't keep up with the big design blogs like I used to in previous years. What does inspire me is non-web design, especially in packaging, magazines, or book covers. Especially book covers: book jacket design is seriously underrated as a source of inspiration for web designers. There is so much interesting work being done in the publishing industry, and since websites, like books, are indeed judged by their covers (so to speak), I don't think it's that far off base to find inspiration there.

Q: Do you have any advice for other style designers?

Design styles you yourself would want to use. If you have no interest in using it, why should anyone else? You're always going to have to live with the choices you make as a designer and you run a greater risk of making poor decisions when designing something you dislike or are disinterested in from the beginning. Design a style for people to download shouldn't feel like work, especially since you're doing it for free! The minute it begins to feel like work, you need to take a step back and re-examine what you're doing. It's easy to be your own worst critic, but it's even easier to be your own best client.