A lot of the job as a web designer never pans out how you anticipate it. Most when they start out think they will end up working for websites where anything is possible and there is a elastic budget the size of America. One of the major things that soon becomes clear is a lot of your time will be in some way or the other reinventing the wheel. This can be in the developer side of creating an application or through taking branding or another site and reinventing it. Quick into any web design career you realise that the idea of having a blank canvas to design with is an illusion and the vast majority of it is taking something and developing it into a usable site.
With the advent of increased awareness in web standards this reinventing has increased for me. I find that practically every site I do now is taking some web standard nightmare frankenstein design site and doing some dramatic design plastic surgery. Apart from my own projects there really has been only one or two so far this year that have been from scratch projects. Even those from scratch projects have on the whole had some strict branding and design restrictions.
Rather than being put off I infact like designing within restrictions. I am sure this is one reason I choose web design (whether that was subconscious or conscious I am not sure). It sort of goes against the software engineering principle of never reinventing the wheel. In web though the wheel often is rusty, square and therefore useless, or either the wrong size or not a wheel and infact a whisk or some other useless object. In these standard cases it is a need to reinvent the wheel. Reinventing is good if it is indeed imporving. Here it gets a bit into that argument a while back about designing and realining sites. What I am talking about is evolving these websites not doing it all for the sake of it.
I personally get a lot of pleasure from someone finally seeing what they wanted from the site and had failed to get from the first version. There are so many good ideas out there online that just are not executed well through design or code and as a result fail. This is a shame and I firmly believe that as long as the idea is solid and the design and development reflect it, you are giving the project the best chance at success. Maybe, if you look at some of your projects, rather than thinking that was a naff idea or simply wouldn’t work; think about whether it is the design, functionality or development that is holiding back a sound idea. Too often the core idea is blamed when the wrong choices were made in execution. In Business the standard is to look at the project as a whole and focus on execition – so why does the design and the development not get looked at as the cause of the issues first?
I am not stating that just by changing the deisgn or development you can make good of a crummy idea to start of. What I find in a lot of projects is that bad advice or even designers and devleopers who promised moon on sticks have put off the clients by making a hash of the execution. I have found more than one client come to me stating they have given up on vavrious projects that upon analysis have a strong grounding. This is a shame I feel and constantly find aggressive releases toward these so called web cowboys and girls that promise the moon on a stick and end up not even giving the stick.
Part of any web designer or developers job is to be realistic. This is in the sense of their skills and the potential for any project. It might be seen as a fool hardy methodology on my part, but I will not take on any client work if I honestly think they are wasting their time. There is no point in reinventing the wheel if the core idea is that it should be made of jelly – this plainly will not work no matter how pretty the CSS is. Part of it is about being honest about the negative and the positive in any project. Reinventing wheels is not a simple matter of taking any wheel and slapping it through a restyle.
