fog of eternity

I recently set up a new personal blog called Roaming In Thought, with a victorian/steampunk design. I'm very happy with the way it turned out. It may break entirely in Internet Explorer 6, but for a personal project that's not a major priority for me to fix. Creating a steampunk themed blog design was quite tough, and it made me realise that it's very easy to slip into standard ways of thinking when it comes to web design.

Bad Habits

When I was first drafting a few ideas for the design, I was doing so on my laptop. I played around with Photoshop, drafted some basic HTML and CSS, looked around StumbleUpon for inspiration. You know, the usual kind of things web designers often do when they're getting started on a new project?

None of the ideas I was coming up with were particularly satisfying. They were too grid based, or boxed off. They looked too slick and modern. Worst of all, they just looked kind of derivative. I was looking to do something a little bit different with the design, trying to create something that had an antique style, and my usual practices weren't working.

Step Away From The Machine

I realised that I was trying to start the doing part of web design before I had really addressed the designing part. It's a trap that's very easy to slip into. When you're not actively doing something, getting something down in code, on a screen, you don't feel like you're actually being productive. That's a dangerous mindset to get into.

I made a conscious effort to turn my laptop off. To spend some time simply thinking about what I was trying to achieve. I tried to approach it in purely design terms, turning over in my mind what I wanted for a look and feel. I also tried to specifically avoid thinking about the technical limitations any design would face, and just get a really good personal feel for the concept I was trying to achieve.

Inspired

Just thinking about design, concept and appearance, without reference to anything on a computer screen or the limitations of web design technology, made me feel really inspired. I suddenly felt far more enthused, because I was thinking about how great something could look rather than how I was actually going to implement it.

The ideas started to come together into some kind of overall concept. I thought about the layout of Victorian era newspapers and decided that it would be great to try and reflect that. Then I remembered a particular newspaper advert I'd seen some time ago for La Machine, and how cool aspects of that would look. Even then I didn't rush back to the computer (which was an act of will). I got some paper and started sketching out some ideas. Sometimes I'm reluctant to do this because I'm rubbish at drawing, but really the important thing is not to be able to put down on paper some great work of art. It's just another method of letting design thoughts come together.

Putting It Into Practice

Thinking about the design was liberating. It meant that when I came to develop the actual website with code and CSS I was in a mindset where the code would be subject to the design, and not the other way round. By not thinking about the technical problems beforehand I approached the coding with the idea that I could work something out to overcome those limitations, instead of limiting the design itself. That's not to say that Roaming In Thought is some crazy departure in web design, but it's a site that looks like it did in my mind, not just on a screen.

Changing my mindset like this has been a hugely positive move. It's given me a renewed enthusiasm for making websites that look great, and confidence in my own creative ability. Playing with design ideas in your head is just great fun, because your imagination isn't limited. By doing that first you realise that actually most of the technical implementation problems can be overcome, which means that long term I'm far more positive about the strength of my design work and concepts when they're put into practice online.