I am a coder, not a designer
When I think about a site design, I draw it out. Then, if it needs complicated imagery I go and make those images. The actual design part is never moved any further than paper, no photoshop mocks, just a pencil sketch. I code design.
For this site, I drew out the initial idea and I went straight to textedit, photoshop comes afterwards and is only for the little things like the content highlight image. Of course, this presents a problem when dealing with clients, who would rather have many photoshop mocks than anything else. They are wrong. It takes me much less time to code 3 templates in CSS/xHTML as long as I cut out the photoshop stage. If I go through the entire, well used design process using mocks etc, then it quite easily triples the time. But the simple fact is, it makes the final product worse.
Most designers I know have a simple process: pencil sketch >> photoshop mock(s) >> xHTML/CSS design to code >> extras/revisions. To me, it’s wrong. I work like this: pencil/pen sketch >> xHTML/CSS framework >> photoshop bits (if needed) >> full site >> revisions/extras. Thats it really, a slight difference but it just seems to work better. If you start with code then you can get the layout and see the basic idea before you begin to design.
…and those are my thoughts for the day. I’ve been a little slack on posting lately, I have my GCSE’s starting in three days so it’s been all work no play 
Good luck to all those taking they’re GCSE’s too.
One big site
I’ve always had a dream, to have only one site, one url for everything I host. A site to contain:
- My company
- My hosting company division
- My blog
- My new script (Stat Monster)
- My ‘hub‘
- My CSS gallery
I believe that’s it currently. I would just love to have them all under one site, one directory, one design. Of course, that would be really stupid. But from an organization point of view, one site with other sites based as subdirectories is best right? Having one header file, one footer file, one design to manage, one site for people to visit. Yeah it would have benefits but would it be better than multiple domains like the current set up?
the now
Currently on the web most people who have multiple sites or types of content to host, use multiple domains/designs/sites. I have it too, as shown above. The closest site I can think of to what I want is google. They have everything or almost everything under one general design and one main domain. Yeah, they have a billion domains but they all redirect to directories or subdomains of google.com. I can see that from many point of view’s, this is a much much better way of organizing data. As for everyone else, people seem to choose one of two routes: having a ‘hub’ with all their sites branching off that site. Or, simply having multiple sites. For some reason this set up just annoys me.
What d’ya think?
Simple Monster
Before a thousand design changes ago, I had this design. A simple clean, thin, one column design with a small grey box in the middle for content. Well, now I have it released to the public, as a wordpress theme. It’s very simple and I wasn’t going to release it but after being asked a few times I have done.
The art of the icon
So recently I’ve been upping my photoshop skills. Inspired by a discussion on Mint Pages I have decided to have a go at icon creation. Why not? I’ve never really considered making icons before, not because I didn’t want to but because I’m lazy and just use the same set everyone does. With some idea as to how to go about making icons and a nice little helper, I plodded on an popped open the ol’ photoshop.
creating ‘blobs’
So I made my first icon, a little man. Well, a man zoomed in 1000 times. At scale of 1, a blob. Making icons viewable (especially at such a small size at 16px*16px) is close to impossible. Normally in photoshop I never fill the canvas, I like a little space to the side of my work, a little ‘relaxation’ space. You can’t do that with icons, your pixel by pixel creation has to touch as much side of the canvas as possible, or it’ll be a blob.
I think that these days, with so many great icon artists around, designers and normal internet users just take them for granted. We just assume that these icons are made with no effort and it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong, I was wrong, we all were wrong. Each and every icon requires at least half an hour to get right (well it does for me – and mine aren’t perfect). Each and every icon also requires great care and skill to complete (which is why mine are rubbish).
the result
My attempts (can you guess what each is?):
A beautiful sight…
Normally I don’t post recycled stuff from Digg, but this time I had to. It’s always a wonderful thing to see your most hated company taking ideas from your favourite:
