How to be a good designer
Posted by kevin Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:53:01 GMT
Last year I decided it was time to ‘get professional’.
For me, that meant buying a bunch of books on usability and studying ‘experts’ and the big web sites like amazon, etc.
Short rant: I hate amazon’s design. It’s always been hideous. The new one is a bit better, at least they realized having 300 tabs was confusing. But now there’s none! And they advertise movies + free shipping on their front page instead of books, talk about losing your perspective.
So I read ‘don’t make me think’, and several other good books. I’ve learned a lot. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Except now, when I design something, it seems like there’s one ‘right way’. I’ve gotten used to this using a programming language ‘ruby’, where we refer to it as the ‘Ruby way’. But design is supposed to be a creative and artistic process. Now making things simple enough seems to lead to one specific design that I like, but I don’t think is flashy or pretty enough. But I can’t change anything, because that would break my usability guidelines.
I’m looking forward to hopefully hiring someone in Pittsburgh to help with the design process. Except now that I’ve read all these books, I’m going to know way more than them. Hopefully it will work out, I really need someone to bounce ideas off, and to come up with creative color schemes and layouts themselves.
I’ve never been an amazing programmer, but now I’m not a good designer either! Uggh, this is progress?
Relax and breathe deeply.
Just because you can’t come up with a design off the top of your head doesn’t mean that you can’t be a good designer. You’ve given yourself a solid grounding in usability, but you need to balance that out with some design education as well. There’s an old saying: if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
A good place to start would be <cite>The Designer’s Complete Index</cite>, by Jim Krause. It consists of three volumes he’s written on various aspects of design: <cite>Layout Index</cite> (sample layouts), <cite>Color Index</cite> (a collection of color schemes), and <cite>Idea Index</cite> (various graphical treatments that can be combined in interesting ways). <cite>Complete Index</cite> is only $38 on Amazon. Also be sure to check out his latest in the series, <cite>Design Basics Index</cite>. It covers basic design concepts, techniques, ideas on brainstorming and concepting, samples, and tips for making your way in the business.
Those books are good, quick, inexpensive reads that will get you started. Once you’re ready for something a little more academic, <cite>The Elements of Graphic Design</cite> and <cite>Type in Use</cite>—
both by Alexander White—should give you a reasonably thorough understanding of the more advanced principles of the field.You’re obviously motivated, so I encourage you to keep at it. As a fellow aspiring web designer, I wish you the best of luck.
Oops. I didn’t realize your CMS would leave in the HTML as regular text. Can I talk you into stripping all those <cite> tags out so that I don’t look like such a boob? ;-)
Thanks for the book suggestions, I’ll check them out! Not sure if I can set typo to allow <cite> and other tags, but I’ll take a look.
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