More thoughts on design!

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a freel­ance job posting. It was quite an exhaustive pro­cess, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the examples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!)

Pro­cess

1.Do you start with a rough comp or go straight into a “fin­ished” design?

Usu­ally when working for cli­ents I’ll start with four dif­ferent ini­tial rough mockups. We then revise back and forth, and with each stage of revi­sion I start pulling the pieces together into a more pol­ished final, along with applying the client’s suggestions.

1a. Do you mock up on paper or in photoshop?

A little bit of both, usu­ally … though I usu­ally don’t show the paper mockups to anyone!

2. How much time do you usu­ally spend cre­ating a home page design?

This tends to vary depending on the client and their budget. Most of my cli­ents are small-budget so I keep things as quick as pos­sible without sac­ri­fi­cing aes­thetics too much. Usu­ally, to take a design from mockups through to com­pleted tem­plate (before any coding hap­pens!) takes around 10 hours, including all the stages of revision.

3. How much time do you typ­ic­ally spend “pol­ishing” a design?

I have been known to spend tens of hours, but gen­er­ally, as I do try to keep an eye on the clock and not indulge my per­fec­tionist side too much, it tends to average out at about 5–10 hours, depending of course on the com­plexity of the design!

4. Would you say you are more “get it done, get it out” focused or “get it per­fect” focused?

I think I’m nat­ur­ally more the latter … if I’m designing some­thing for myself or for a client who doesn’t have time restric­tions, I can spend a good deal of time poring over the minute details. But most of my cli­ents want it done now, and don’t have a lot of money to spend indul­ging me, so I do quite effect­ively steer myself towards the “get it done” line of focus.

5. How do you manage design quality vs. time available?

I try to make it so that my pro­cess facil­it­ates better quality, and obvi­ously, as I get better, I find that I’m able to do better work in less time, and spend less time on work that goes nowhere. I try to really restrict the amount of time I put into rough comps, as a lot of this can be “wasted” time. I’ve got to the point where I can do comps far more quickly, and am then left with more time near to the end of a pro­ject to refine and polish. I also try to make myself focus on the things that people will actu­ally notice, rather than the things that only matter to me, and this keeps my per­spective in line a bit.

Style

1. How would you describe your artistic style?

I do tend to vary—one of the things I love about design is that you don’t really need to pigeon­hole your­self into one aes­thetic, as dif­ferent pro­jects require dif­ferent styles. How­ever, I find my style usu­ally tends toward being rather clean & simple, with bold lines and colour. I like to offset this with the use of tex­tures and typo­graphic flour­ishes, so that things aren’t quite so stark.

2. Who would you say has influ­enced your design style?

That’s another thing that I love about design! Influ­ences come from every­where … I can be as inspired by a bottle of juice as I can be by a stun­ning web­site. I find my style is most influ­enced by beau­tiful things that I find around me—good recent examples of this are this gor­geous PaperB­lanks day planner I bought, a book called “The Modern Gen­tleman”, and the shape of the tree out­side my window.

3. What do you think should drive the visual style of a website?

The most important thing is that it reflects the mes­sage of its con­tent, and is in line with its company’s mar­keting object­ives. That comes first—some sites require a tex­tured, elab­orate look, while others demand some­thing sim­pler or more professional-looking. I always try to ensure I have a good idea of what the design should be “saying” prior to even thinking about a design. Design can com­mu­nicate so much before anyone reads even so much as a word on the page; it’s vital that your first impres­sion be the right one!

4. What are some examples of sites (not yours) that you like?

butterlondon.com, alistapart.com, chicagomanualofstyle.org, giohalifax.com, walnutgrovespring.com, marketcircle.com, 37signals.com, klf.org, webdesignerwall.com

5. What are some examples of sites that you dislike?

MySpace! about.com … there are so many, it’s really hard to just name a few!
Misc

1. To what extent were you taught/receive formal training on design vs. learning by yourself?

I actu­ally learned web design, and, by exten­sion, the basics of PS, when I was about four­teen, so I’d been doing it relying on a “good eye” for some time before I went to school.  School gave me a decent under­standing of the basics and of how to apply them, but I found that I’ve learned much more since being out of school! I read a lot: web­sites, magazines, books, and I’m always trying to learn new things. I feel con­stantly like a student.

2. What design web­sites do you read regularly?

A List Apart, Vit­amin, Veer, design.Principles, Be a Design Group (since defunct), Graphic Define, Freel­anceSwitch, The Book Design Review.

3. What is your a recent blog post or art­icle on design you enjoyed?

There was a fant­astic art­icle in the last issue of Design Edge magazine about book cover design that I really enjoyed, and another one about this redesign of a honey manufacturer’s mar­keting mater­ials. (I tend to enjoy reading magazines more than I do web­sites! I spend too much time staring into the screen.) I recently really enjoyed this His­tory of the Ampersand.

4.What are your top three “must read” books on design?

Stop Stealing Sheep, The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, Uni­versal Prin­ciples of Design.

5. What are the latest trends in web design?

Gradi­ents, things reflected in invis­ible mir­rors (this usu­ally is done without any logical con­sid­er­a­tion), that curly/flourishy vector look, extra whitespace to create a long long scrolling page, use of large icons and dir­ecting graphics, increased sim­pli­city, grunge ele­ments seem to be back again, but in more of a texture/background sort of a way…

Tags: books, design, interview, process, projects, style, trends, typography, websites