Emulating that warm feeling you get knowing there are a few other people between you and the vehicles at the traffic lights: a new incarnation of ldexterldesign is well and truly bosched – or should I say botched?! – More on that later. Hindered by a blown PSU, horrible customer support from a certain website I won’t mention (Overclockers), a relocation (I now reside in Bristol, England, which is an awesome volcanic hub of creativity), and a rather crippling hand injury this site has been many months in the making. I actually started designing it in March, over six6 months ago would you believe?!
Alas it’s all systems go over the next few months as I aim to document my play and work through this lovely platform. Thanks to WordpressCheck out the world famous blogging tool, which really has taken the mind numbing hours of coding out of the equation (less of those I feel), it now frees me up to concentrate on the eye candy side of things for a while, which I’m finding really refreshing.
As of this post I’m ‘leisurely’ seeking work of all types related to the content of this site; both paid and un-paid. I’m currently doing bits and bobs for, and through, numerous other exceedingly talented people across the internet so if I can’t help, for whatever reason, I know people who can. Just drop me a line or give me a callClick to email or ring me on +44 (0)7504 907304. My name is Lewis and UK rates will apply if you’re calling from abroad.
‘Lewis, I love the colours, but isn’t it a little too much for the eye?’
I’ve been designing for the best part of five5 years now and I’m aware, as a designer, that style is important – now so more than ever. It’s a given we live in a very visual culture. I still count myself lucky I’m a fairly versatile designer and don’t pitch everything I do through a text editor. I look at the drabbest (we’re talking aesthetics here) websites of friends and acquaintances who are developers and software people and wonder how the hell they ever get work (I don’t know if they actually do btw). Hell I’m often ashamed they don’t ask me for a quick and cheap design overhaul half the time but there you go.
Anyway, I digress… I had the realisation about six6 months ago that I could be an adaptable designer and work on corporate layouts all my life or could forage for and develop a style of my own; a style that made me happy and excited to sit and work at my desk on a day-to-day basis. Sure my style might not be for everyone, but I took that oath a long time ago when I stopped relying on constant feedback on my work. In time it helped me and so continuing to adopt this mentality and work ethic I’m designing stuff that pleases me. Client stuff is good, and always welcomed, but I feel it’s so much more important to have a client come to you because they want you to work on their stuff. From past experience; trying to avoid the ditch in a tug-of-war battle until the deadline date is not fun and I think until you put yourself out there by cementing a style you’ve always got that danger of enticing clients who just want a job done, and not a designer to do it for them. Given that all my friends who make a living out of designing things had already adopted a style you could say I’m learning from common sense more than anything.
It also occurred to me that this attitude (ultimately my personal attitude) can easily be interpreted as stubbornness. Stubbornness to allow myself to develop my talents as a versatile designer – some would call this the Holy Grail and one in the same thing – but who knows. I’d welcome your opinionsShare your thoughts on how to be a happy designer.
Grabbing usability feedback when you can!
As with most projects I tend to try and keep them ‘hush hush’ until they’re ready to be released in order not to get influenced too much, but seen as this project spanned on and on I’d managed to gain quite a bit of, both positive and not so positive, feedback from people gazing over my shoulder and the like. Predictably feedback on the aesthetics of this website occurred, which for the most part was handy but influenced me little, as the look and style I wanted to achieve had been brewing for a while. The juicy stuff came from the usability – watching peopleJakob Nielsen: The First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users take in the homepage, locate the content, use of the browser back button always interesting for instance – where one starts to become enlightened. It never occurred to me before that the way I design websites might be heavily influenced by the way I use a browser. The two merge on so many levels. Just as users expect desktop application functionality from web apps these days, many also expect web pages to do the browsers work too – using ‘back links’ on pages instead of relying on the browsers to facilitate this for them etc. However, I don’t think this point has come yet so tend to leave more of the obvious navigation out in favour of letting the browser do the work. I’ve read Jakob Nielsen’s stuff over the years and relying on one single, generic interaction techniqueSee spiel on ‘”Return to Top” Links by Jakob Nielsen is something he endorses too. So we’ll go with it.
As the experienced in usability will know; letting someone test your ideas on a monitor can be notoriously hard to witness without influencing their natural way of doing things. Think of it like this: the more negative stuff they tell you the more you have to improve on – and keep this in your head the whole time. Aim to suck out more and more spiteful comments. Aim to adopt the tone of a teenage schoolgirl slumber party, where each of you makes comments on the tone of the language, intuitiveness of completing tasks and ways to navigate to different content. Yes it would make for a boring slumber party, but ultimately one hell of an improvement list.
Wordpress and how to integrate it nicely :P
[Just in case you can’t be arsed to read the following few paragraphs: to cut a long story short my tip (until I find a better way) is set up WP on your web server and work with the WP Theme Editor from your browser; copying and pasting into your local text editor as you go if you require the convenience of all the WYSIWYG and colour-codery.]
One thing I’ve been asked a few times since releasing this site/theme/whatever you want to call it is how I’d customized it so heavily without hacking up the default Wordpress HTML? For example having the ‘About’ text on every page. The answer, ashamedly but learnedly, is that I have hacked it up. I’m not proud of it, because doing it all again I would have simply modularised any div sections further and tucked them away in their own place ready for PHP include()’s. The handy thing about WP framework is you don’t expect it to cater for your needs and you go and try something by mistake and it facilitates it like you’re weaning a young pup. Adding new files to your content inventory then appear in the backend (Google tracking code for instance) – it’s all really swell and has since encouraged me to start adding new scripts. MattVisit Matt Mullenweg’s site - the founder of Wordpress and the guys at WP really have amazed me to the point of educating me with everything from backend-menu usability to software engineering etiquette to standards and structure (and I’m so hard-line about standards they give me sleepless nights sometimes!).
First and foremost at this point I would declare myself more of a designer than developer, although I’m constantly in flux about where I fall in this spectrum. If I need to do something generally I just find a way of making it happen. It’s only when I get compliments that push me toward one end or the other, which allows me to ground myself and discover where I’m at in the grand scheme of things.
The main reason I wanted to deploy a blogging tool was to get to grips with the challenge of integrating my designs with someone else’s fruits ala designer/developer studio scenario, given the fact collaboration is the phrase of the year more than ever right now imo, especially since SOOO many web people are joining forces and declaring they are now working with ’so and so’. Designing the site was the easy thing. Integrating it was not so easy (at first). You see most people I know who dabble in WP set the platform up first and then style it. It’s inherently boring to begin with and only gets worse from there on in as it spirals up their own arses. I designed ldexterldesign V4 first, knowing what I wanted to improve upon from the previous version. I needed to harmoniously blog and show work off in a space that reeked of my style from the outset. I didn’t want to bear the constraints of WP, or get led by the hand of an interface that already existed.
I’m still split between what’s best: design a screenshot or a front-end first and then integrate WP or vice versa? The more I think about doing it an alternative way, the more I recall the positives of doing it the way I did it and, again, vice versa. I still feel the crux of the matter is if you want to fully customize a WP theme you need a good understanding of, not surprisingly, all the technologies involved, which is a drawback if you don’t (have the understanding).
I initially tried to install WP locally along with my DB. Instead I find half way through weaving the platform into my design that the comments, among other functionality, doesn’t work for some reason. A few posts on the Wordpress support forumVisit my post on the Wordpress forum didn’t shed much light on the issue, so along with the discovery of the built in ‘theme editor’ (yep, I almost slashed my wrists) I collected my coat and left for the tiled browser yellow-brick-road. I’ve since become quite comfortable working in and out of theme editor, copying and pasting code into my favoured text editor locally and pasting amendments (CSS/XHTML/PHP) back into the browser. It’s really not ideal, but I don’t see much of an alternative without everything working 100% locally. Perhaps I had something set up incorrectly. Only time will tell because I’m still going to pursue the local environment route the next time I work with WP to see if I have the same problems. I’ll endeavour to report back to you… :P
