As a designer you are all too aware that if you stop inputting inspiration into your brain mix there soon comes stagnation. Inspiration is the fuel that keeps you going as a designer. For me, this comes in 2 forms ‘design’ in sense of things I see and websites I view and colour. Colour to me can be just inspiring as seeing a complete design. I’m a hoarder of screen-shots and links for inspiration and with that comes 2 new sites announcements.

In an ideal world as a designer you’d only ever have one client, in reality you probably have more. Design by committee can be a hellish situation for any designer, but there are various things you can do to make sure the process is easier.

37 signals wrote this week ‘Web designers should do their own HTML / CSS’. This post basically follows thinking I’ve had for a long time where by you shouldn’t call yourself a web designer if you can not code HTML/ CSS. As expected there are some pretty strong for and against opinions in the comments. In the past I’ve been fairly vocal myself about my opinion on this and also experienced in my working life the frustration of making up a design from someone who doesn’t understand the web as a medium or HTML / CSS.

Yesterday saw the launch of the new 9rules. The post announcing it’s launch on the 9rules blog - 9rules vol 3 edition 1 - shows the focus has moved back onto members content and the design reflects this. My first reaction on seeing it was ‘wow’, my second was ‘woot’ and my third was akin to a little girl excited noise just like someone had given me a new toy.

There really seems a return to the minimal in design lately, something I’m more than happy to see after the gradient madness of the last year or so. I’m seeing more and more new designs coming out where less is really more. Galleries seem to be once again brimming full of powerful minimal design, it’s a refreshing change. In part minimal design never went away it seems now the focus is coming back to it though as it rightly deserves as one of the most effective and often hardest to achieve design styles. So, what does make a minimal design?

Considering a lot of the work I do is taking my design and crafting it into code, I thought I would write a mini tutorial on how I go through this process. I’m sure my process is fairly similar to mosts after all there are only a limited number of things you can do differently to get the result, but I thought it may be a good way to bring insight into both my working process and be also of interest to someone who may not have done it before.