Some time ago I ran across a BusinessWeek article about Apple’s design process:

Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work.

This really struck me as quite profound. I’ve participated in brainstorming sessions, creative sessions, (or whatever else you want to call them) where the goal of the meeting was to come up with creative ways to solve problems and restrictions. The most successful of these meetings followed something similar to Apple’s process.

Why is this?

There seems to be something intensely paralyzing about trying to find creative solutions while at the same time trying to remember all of the constraints of the tiny square you’ve painted around yourself. Trying to find solutions that solve all of the problems while staying inside of the constraints of the box is an unproductive ritual of self-guessing. You end up shooting yourself down on every idea you come up with. “This won’t work. That won’t either…”

A lesson to be learned from authors

Authors write a rough draft. They just kind of vomit everything out, and then write and write until they run dry. Then they go back and refine parts that need refining. Many authors will do 9 or 10 rewrites until the finished book ends up being very different from the original draft. The rough draft gets their ideas out on paper. They can improve it. They can show it to others who can critique it.

Designer’s Block

Just like writers have “writer’s block” so do designers. I find the best remedy to this (after sketching and doing the normal research) is to simply open up photoshop and start pushing pixels. Overwhelmingly, after 10 minutes or so of this, I can see a solution and am excited to finish the piece.

Summary & Conclusion

Have 1 meeting where anything goes. Everybody’s idea is appreciated. There are no dumb ideas. This is a meeting for trying to find ways an idea could work.

Have a 2nd half or separate meeting where you shoot holes in those ideas. You then usually end up with the really good ones.

A word of caution before I end. There is such a thing as getting input from too many people. With most brilliant ideas, many people don’t recognize them as such. There will often be opposition. Show it to the right people you trust. Not too many. Design by committee is useless. Now go forth and be brilliant.

Tired. That about sums up how I feel. The many hours I’ve spent in the wee of the morning before work. The weekends spent doing nothing but crafting this puppy, taming the beast we call WordPress.

I’m finally happy enough to launch it. So here it is. Of course I’ll be polishing the site some more over the coming months, but I’m itching to move on to other projects that have been kept waiting.

My previous design

Why a new site?

I had just finished my previous design, and was very proud of it. I showed it to my brother who just threw up all over it. At first I was just going to ignore his comments, but then I really thought deeply about what he’d said, sifted through his comments, and extrapolated what he really meant when he said certain things.

It made me realize that I had gone about the entire design process for that site completely wrong. I needed to seriously rethink my methodology. So I pondered and looked to where I could make improvements.

Goals

I thought about what the purpose of the site was and what I was trying to accomplish. Once I set my goals, I realized my current design wasn’t achieving them, primarily because I hadn’t thought very hard about what the site should do. I had just sat down and started running. I think I still came up with something pretty, but pretty isn’t always meaningful. I want design that is meaningful. That will make an impact. That will achieve results.

I don’t like it when people tell me that I’m here to “paint pretty pictures”. I solve problems. I solve business needs. I bring results. It often happens to be pretty. But pretty isn’t the goal. Effective is.

A time to think

I appreciate these times because I get to reflect on my design process and really think about what is working and what isn’t. I looked around the web. I thought hard. I tried to see what other designers were doing, and meditated some.

So I came up with a new process. It seemed to me that the designers I really respect seem to spend a lot more time thinking about their Design before they start and along the way. They can explain why made their choices. So I tried the same thing. I thought. It thought a lot more at each step of the way. I tried to have good design rationale for everything I did. Some things of course, I just did because I wanted to, but that’s part of the fun of it. I think it worked better for me. You be the judge.

In the next few weeks I’ll be talking about my new design process. I’ll be taking a look under the hood of thise and talk about what went into building it. Starting at custom built RSS feeds, Image Replacement, Grid based design and CSS etc.

Until then…