Last night I stayed up far too late finishing a design report of a website. It was the first time that I had performed a formal design report on a professional basis and I wasn’t 100% sure how to structure it. In the end, I critiqued a few screenshots, made a sample mockup, and gave lots of advice on best practice in web design. I used the word heuristics, which means ‘rules of thumb’ or common sense. I didn’t do this because I am pretentious, I did this because I was tired and thought you couldn’t pluralize the phrase ‘rule of thumb’ unless you were Paul McCartney.
The role of design consultant is one that I wold happily reprise. It forces you to think about what is best practice and encourages you to write for the layman. I worry, when I write, that my reader sneer at me because he knows more than me or will frown at my stylistic infelicities. Whereas, in most cases, one’s ideal reader should be an educated everyman.
My main purpose for this particular design report was to make as many good suggestions as possible and to inspire the student, who wanted to improve her site but didn’t know where to start. In this situation, the best thing to do is to work out what it is you want to achieve with your site and who is the audience. During this process, I realised how much thinking tends to go on before you design anything.
Once you know what you and your site are all about, you can start thinking about typography, imagery, colours and layout. For a non-designer it can be difficult to know where to start, so I made a list of the kinds of places that I go to for inspiration, including Daily Slurp, Design Meltdown, Kuler, Veerle and CommandShift3.
The teaching role is an interesting one. It can seem frustrating that you can’t instantly transmit your knowledge to another person, but if you could there would never be originality. All you can hope is that your rules of thumb carry a McCartneyesque enthusiasm.
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