The Unskilled Designer

Although I like playing around with graphic design, I’m not good at it. This is not modesty: I have created some designs that I think work quite well (like the one for this weblog), but what I can do is very limited. And I usually need lots of good examples to study to create something.

The past few weeks I’ve been working on a new website for Oops, the company I work for. The biggest part of this was trying to figure out how to present ourselves. The current website does a very poor job at that. The first weeks or so I approached this in a different way than before. Usually I start with the design, only to fail because I have no clear picture of the “content.” So this time I refrained from thinking about design until later.

When the content had begun to stabilize I compiled a mood board from fragments that I liked. I liked this approach, because it enabled me to get a picture of what I wanted to accomplish. But I still kept from doing any graphic design. Instead, I worked on the structure of the content I put together: grouping things, ordering them, laying them out on the page.

Finally, I begun playing with the design. I made several attempts at creating something that felt like the mood board, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them. However, in the process there emerged several elements that made it into the final design. And oddly enough, the final design departed quite a bit from the mood board. But it was of great help.

(I can’t show the new design yet. It will go online after my vacation, in five weeks or so.)