WTF?!

Once upon a time, I could make pretty things. I mean, I was no Van Gogh, but they weren’t terrible. Certainly not compared the majority of the comedy design work you see strewn across the web. So, given the difficulty I seem to have these days designing even the simplest site, what the &#$% happened?

I have no copies of my earliest web design/development work. All of this was produced either when I was working “freelance” (not in any official capacity—I was knocking up sites for local bands as learning exercise), or at my previous full time gig, my first real paid web position. Combined, those two periods span about 7 years and that’s a lot of material to have completely lost to idiotically poor backup regimes and corporate bankruptcy.

How did I do that?!

Earlier today, I suddenly recalled one band site I had worked on a long time ago. It’s long dead but I found a partially working copy of it on the Wayback Machine. I don’t want to link to it—the database that fuelled the Flash front end couldn’t be archived of course, and a bunch of sub-movies are missing, so it really doesn’t look or work as it should. But visually I thought it was pretty impressive. Now, that sounds a little arrogant. But the point is that I can’t imagine even conceiving of that design now. I feel so removed from whatever state of mind I was in when I built that site that it doesn’t feel like I really did it and I can get away with praising my own work.

I’m not really required to design anything at work, luckily for them. But recently, in the privacy of my own home, I’ve been mocking up some basic layouts for some old ideas and just for fun… just to see what I could come up with blind. Results have been mixed. Few are outright bad. Most are simply dull. In particular I seem to have a problem with choosing colours. As I mentioned, I’m not a trained designer. Without reference material, I have no idea which colour works with another in this way or that.

The value of inspiration

It seems that the more I’ve learned about “the way to build websites” over the years, the more restricted I have become in imagining how they can be presented. There is certainly no lack of inspiration. The 3,000 CSS galleries out there provide a constant flow of eye candy, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find a rather smashing article which lists “500 Ways to Instantly Be Excellent at Whatever”.

Is that too much inspiration? Is looking at row after row of beautiful and mostly only subtly different work helpful or a hindrance? The content is often repeated from one site to the next and trends are shared. I find myself looking at quite similar sites over and over. There may be some very nice aspects to a design but their impact is dulled somewhat by the sheer number of nice aspects I’m having to take in one after the other. The whole internet becomes a homogenized mush in my mind and this makes it hard to imagine sets of specific, complimentary features or visual elements as part of something new, or at least different.

The goal, I guess, should be to learn how to absorb inspiration appropriately, analyzing what I’m seeing and picking out the parts I like, why and for what they could be useful, rather than simply looking at all of these sites, saying “ooh”, then moving on to the next. That and practice, obviously. I used to sit and experiment for hours. My day job at the time had nothing to do with this industry so the evening were playtime. Didn’t do much for what was my relationship at the time, but it was an exciting time in terms of learning and trying new things. In moderation, more of that is required again I think. So I’ll keep mocking up my crap and hopefully get better over time. I’ll try to work out what I like about things I see rather than just admiring how shiny they are. And anything else I think of long after posting this that didn’t occur to me at the time but is in fact painfully obvious.