Designing From the heart, not the mind
As a web designer, I have the opportunity to take a website from the initial concept to the completed project. This involves everything from site mapping, branding and interface design all the way through front end coding, functionality and finally publishing to the World Wide Web.
Throughout this process, designers must move fluidly between several different trains of thought. We must first put ourselves in the shoes of the client and the audience of the website in order to understand what this site needs based on who it is to be geared toward. Then we must quickly transform into an artist to create a beautiful website. Finally we must become a developer, and think in a logical, linear process to complete things.
What I'm getting at is that as a designer, who handles the design and the development process, it becomes hard to keep my mind on one only part of the process. For example, when I go to design a website, my mind ends up picturing something along these lines:
While this eventually helps when it comes to the development part of my job, I feel it also hurts my creativity. When my mind is on the code, how can I possibly design to my full potential?
It has been said that design is art with limitations and while I agree that we do have limitations, I feel that we shouldn't limit ourselves on top of that by keeping our technological limitations in mind. I feel that we should design from the heart, and let our creativity out of its cage. We shouldn't let the print designers have all the fun!
So what do we do about it?
My new process of thought is to ignore the idea that I'm designing for the web; forget that I will eventually have to put this beautiful piece of art into a rigid structured block of code and instead, let myself explore new directions with my designs. This may slow me down in the end, when it comes time to code, but I never want to be known for being fast, but for being unique.
So what I'm thinking is let's take this mindset:
and turn it into this one:
Basically what I'm saying is that we should take this one step at a time. I have included the planning steps of this project since I am usually thinking of design at that moment as well, especially when the client is asking me what colors or what it will look like. So as I said, ignore it for now. Get your clients requirments and the audiences needs out of the way before you start thinking colors and style. Once that is done, and you have finished your design, figure out how to make this beauty work!
I have met some designers in the past who do strict design, never touching the code for a second. I always found that these designers have unique, interesting ideas that break out of the normal boxy design that we have all come to know and love. It's these types of people that I try to think like -- pretending for a minute that someone else, someone who loves to code, will be taking this design off my hands and putting it on the web.