It takes a real understanding of the problem to provide the right solution. This means designers need to be involved at the very early stages of a project. Thinking that a designer can come along at the end and ‘design’ it basically means that they are looking for someone to simply style their solution.

Design is not simply styling.

If this happens, and if you willfully let it happen then you are harming the profession you work in. To get away from this situation, you need to educate those you work with.

Designers should be involved at the very beginning. This avoids a ‘chinese whispers’ effect of others interpreting the requests a certain way and relaying them. It is best to be with the client or stakeholder to understand their requests firsthand. Afterwards, write a brief and have all parties agree to it. This will be the brief that the design solution is marked against.

This is the start of getting away from simply styling other peoples’ solutions.

But as soon as you let the client call the shots, you are a pixel pusher, bowing to the whims of a client.

Thing is, if you don’t tell them, they won’t know (what not to do). Laying out the rules early will avoid things like this being said:

• I’ll know it when I see it.
• I think we’re nearly there.
• I showed it to my son/daughter and they suggested…
• I’m not feeling it yet.

You get the point.

The thing is, the design process should be a collaborative one, just make sure you lay out what work the client should be doing.

Clients know their business better than you do.
You know design better they they do.

With this quick understanding, make sure that the client makes the business decisions, and you make the design decisions.

http://www.highersites.co.uk

We’re a web design company in Somerset, and although I have only recently joined the team in April, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far – working on some great sites with an awesome team!

A web designer and developer from the UK. I occasionally blog, frequently tweet and often procrastinate.

The last part couldn’t be more true. With RSS feeds, Twitter and other social media, lots of time can be spent keeping up-to-date and researching – but it really boils down to procrastinating (postpone doing what one should be doing).

With the immediacy of these social media, links can come in at any time, easily distracting you away from the current task in hand. Staying ‘in the zone’ can be hard with tweets popping up and other distractions such as IM, text messages and phone calls; chances are you are reading this when something more important needs to be done.

The Solution

Taking a dedicated hour out of your day to deal with these can help alleviate this. You’d be surprised how non-urgent reading your tweets are when you don’t do it for a few hours.

So turn off your Twitter client, IM and sign out of anything which could ‘pop-up’ during your day and give it a go, perhaps taking time out in the morning and afternoon to check-up and see what’s gone on in the real world and see if your productivity increases.

Do you have to make a consious effort to not check emails over the weekend or just finish off that markup before going to bed?

I am sure that a lot of the self-employed people are thinking “that’s nothing new” but is it something you feel obliged to do, or do you feel it adds value to your service to be contactable throughout the week.

This is probably the least constructed blog post to date, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the situation.

Then a competition was launched by Channel 4 called ‘Webit’ aimed at 13-19 year olds. I heard about the competition from my School, and I thought about redesigning paulsmini to enter the competition, but in the end, I decided to just submit the site as it was, and was shocked to be a runner up for the whole competition.

This spurred me on to further a career in web design, and before I finished my A-Levels I asked around for work experience in the industry, which was eventually unsuccessful after contacting a number of them.

My first job was as an IT Administrator at a local manufacturing company, where I managed to redesign their existing site. I was also enrolled in a 3 year Foundation Degree course in Computing and Internet Technology. The course consisted of networking, programming, databases and internet technologies. The Internet for me was my primary focus at the time, although I have continued to learn both databases and programming since; but my primary love is designing.

The more I designed the more I enjoyed it. I liked the fact that every project was different and that no two designs were ever the same. It also made me further myself in design and the design fundamentals, learning about grid based design, the rule of thirds and typography.

I knew eventually that I would have to look for a job doing web design full time if I wanted to continue this, so after seeing an advert in the local paper, I got my CV up to date, made sure that the works site and paulsmini were all live and sent an application. About a week later I got a phone call just after finishing work on the Friday offering an interview, and 24 hours later I was offered the job.

I stayed at the web design company for 18 months, and it gave me a solid foundation into the business of designing websites, having the opportunity to work on 20+ during that time. In the time, I had learnt about ASP and MS SQL Server databases. It gave me a great basis to look for my next job.

Around May 2008 I moved again to my current job, and in the last 9 months I have been working increasingly more in PHP and MySQL, whilst also utilising JavaScript more, with the jQuery library.

My passion for websites continues, and designing them is still what I most enjoy, but I do see the benefits of working on both design and development at the same time, so would never want to just to one of the two.