You had a great idea. You try designing it. You’re frustrated. You give up.
10% inspiration
I tend to skip the initial thought process and attempt to jump straight into the design part. I’m not talking about those creative bursts where you open your favorite graphic editor and in a few minutes you come out with something really cool. I don’t know about you, but those bursts usually happen with something I don’t need and end up in my “playground” folder for some laughs a few years later.
Too often, I open Fireworks (74.38% of you will do so with Photoshop) and start trying to come up with a design directly from an idea in my head. Sometimes it works out all right, sometimes I waste a few hours before giving up and trying something else. I can’t help but think that I’ve thrown away more than a few great ideas because of that. Now, this tends to happen more often when doing graphic design (e.g. logo, stationery, etc) but it can happen when designing a layout for a website. This happens way more often when designing for a personal or new project than when redesigning or working for a client with very tight specifications. This brings me to the probable cause.
Refueling the brain
I’ve been reading a lot more lately. I’ve always enjoyed reading as a kid, but the advent of the computer+internet caused me to lose that, replacing it with “text scanning” and “topical reading.” I won’t go into that right now, but going back to reading really helped broaden my horizons. I’ve been reading about how our brain works—how we think—and also about design and design theory. One of the things that all those books had in common was what I’ll call “the call for thinkers.” We need to think about design just as much as we think when we’re decorating a house. Unless you dislike your house or have an absolute lack of taste, you will think about your decisions when buying furniture and decoration for your house. Moreover, you enjoy looking and being at well decorated house (even if someone else did it). So, why don’t we think about design the same way?
I remember reading somewhere how we need constraints when designing. The more constraints the better. When that one great idea comes to your head—your shining moment—you probably didn’t have any specifications or constraints. It could be a great idea. It can have an amazing potential, but if you try designing that spark before you develop it into a full-blown flame, you run the risk of losing it.
90% perspiration
Mark Boulton, in his “Designing for the Web” book (amazing read) writes about types of briefs. Along with the Client Brief, the Technical Brief and the Creative Brief, there’s the Idea Brief, which is supposed to be “short, concise and describe the project aims.”
An Idea Brief is sometimes the most difficult to write. It needs to be short, concise and open. Good starting points for Idea Briefs are:
- “How to…”
- “We want to…”
- “How do we…”
They start the sentence off in the right way — by asking a question. It’s the designer’s job to come up with the answer.
So go write an idea brief. It can be a half-page long brief, but type it out. Share it with a few close friends. Think about it for a while. Don’t let the spark die and keep adding small firewood to help it grow. Start building around it. If it’s web design, write some markup or code or ask/hire someone if you can’t. And when the flame grows, start designing.
If you’re anything like me, this is not easy. For me, an idea is not a good enough until I can visualize a great design/layout for it. I guess I need to *see* it to *believe* it. But this is keeping me from releasing some good ideas, always waiting for that “great” design. I’m not talking about when you’re working on a design of someone else’s idea, that’s different. But get your idea rolling, learn programming and start building it.
The hard way
You might be reading this and thinking: “This is nonsense” or “I’m not a coder, I’m a designer”. Let me tell you something I’ve been slowly realizing (too slow, perhaps): designing is not about the looks. Got that? Designing is about the flow, it’s about the color balance, the grid, the whitespace. It’s about the interaction, the experience. So think before you design. I’ve had some great ideas that I left to die simply because I worried too much about the looks way too soon. Don’t fall into the same mistakes I have. This idea is neither new nor revolutionary, but I keep making the same mistake over and over again. So maybe this is a selfish article, but please:
Think first; build second. Design later.
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