Three Readymag distinctions that let you experiment with design

A quick glance at Readymag’s Examples—a curated gallery of outstanding websites—reveals tons of experimental layouts and experiences created by designers. It might even be challenging to spot the actual features behind the design decisions. But does it only take a feature recipe to come up with something novel?

In this article, Readymag’s Head of Design, Alexander Moskovskiy, highlights three core distinctions of the tool that encourage out-of-the-box thinking and finding and living out experimental solutions. No cookie-cutter solutions in this text—just fresh perspectives and a dash of inspiration.

Experiments as an essential part of the design process

Experimentation in design means going beyond boundaries and trying to do something unusual, or at least something you haven’t done before or that no one has done before. The wider the toolkit, the more fun it is to experiment. Lego, for example, has great potential for creativity, but it still limits your possibilities of experimentation more than a workshop with a lot of tools, materials, and technologies. Readymag is more like a workshop in the sense that it gives you different objects that have their own behavior, and you can do whatever you want with them, not just play around with blocks of information.

The way classic websites work puts strict restrictions on design: they follow grid structures and semantics. If we also add accessibility and tool restrictions on top of the templated design, it’ll end up being obvious and pre-defined. Such templatization is handy if we think about complex functional tools, but it can stay in the designer’s way when they need to come up with a highly visual, emotional, and uncommon solution.

Experiments in design aren’t just self-indulgence, but a separate stage of work, or even two stages. There’s a separate framework that proves the statement true: the Double Diamond design process model, graphically represented as <><>. Within it, the process goes through four stages—Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver—two of them being experiments.

In the beginning, you’re in the expanding part, researching and gathering the maximum of everything around you, filling yourself up with ideas. Then comes the narrowing stage, when you have to pick a concept. In the middle between these two diamonds, you have this concept, but you’ve already chosen a limitation for it. Then, you go wider again, trying to understand what you can do with the concept and the limitation. Then, you come to a solid solution, narrowing the pool of ideas down again.

It’s important that at the beginning of the expansion stage, the designer doesn’t get hampered by the tool or restricted by the initial choice because, for now, they need every possibility and will restrict themselves later on to stay with the chosen idea.

Readymag works really well in all four stages of the Double Diamond. It allows you to not think about irrelevant processes, but to shape whatever ideas you want. Then, you choose a specific working concept and apply your favorite approaches to it. 

There are three non-obvious Readymag traits that make the tool flexible for experimentation: free layout, animations, and an intuitive interface.

Complete compositional freedom

You can put anything anywhere in any order and any size. This is the main principle of Readymag’’s layout, and is 90% of success in working with typography, composition, and finding new meanings. With the tool, you can think in terms of composition, picture, and spots—the terms that are close to graphic design—and thus overcome the concepts of grid, cells, blocks, and structure. Compositional freedom doesn’t frame your brain in the direction of the classic web and lets your creativity flow in any possible route.

An example of compositional storytelling:

Interchangeable animations for interactivity

The classic web is built on scrolling—every website is mostly a page you go down. By using animations, you’re no longer just following a structure, but directing a movie. Every element lives in parallel: it has an onset, a development, a departure. Having just two static squares is one thing, but it’s entirely different when those squares come to life, each moving independently as you scroll down the page. At that moment, you get out of the field of static composition.

An example of a dynamic interactive portfolio:

Standard websites have limited animation functionality, allowing for the simplest animations or, right off the bat, videos that can only be turned on and off. Readymag gives you a few different, though similar, tools to fully bring an idea to life: Lottie, Shots, GIF, Video with flexible settings, Slideshow, and Readymag animations. These can help you design different animations with great performance, which is hardly possible with videos and GIFs, and set different user actions, such as scroll or cursor moves, as a trigger. You can also add multistep animations, which resemble a movie or a game. You wouldn’t be able to do that with just one technology. If we take a dynamic typography experiment, there are many ways you can do it: just using Readymag animation settings, uploading your designs through Shots or Videos, or designing anything in After Effects and uploading it as Lottie.

The interface as an extension of the workbench

Readymag’s interface is intentionally made to guide you to try new things. If you’re driving a car, it’s worth learning what a button does first before you press it. If you’re doing a project in Readymag, sometimes it’s beneficial to just press a button and see what happens.

There’s a popular belief among designers that in order to do something really new, you should stop using those tools that create familiar systems and instead take a sheet of paper and try to draw on it or use more random tools and approaches: collages, object composition, and more. An instrument itself can also give you food for thought, a random basis on which you can build your experiment further on.

You can experiment with anything as long as you have the mindset, desire, and mood to do so. The limits aren’t in the tools; the limits are in us.