Redesigning a Blog is about Communicating with the Designer

So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.

Penelope Trunk has written a very clever article about communicating with a designer. With a lot of projects clear communication is half the battle. Once communication starts to flow easily, the design process is significantly improved.

Dude you of people shouldn't be lecturing anybody about design.

Inspired by this comment on yesterday's post, I thought I'd address, who I am, and why I feel qualified to talk about design. I'm a professional graphic designer with almost fourteen years of experience, and I've been doing web design to some extent for more than five years. I started my career at a small chain of sporting goods stores in Washington and Idaho. For four and a half years I worked under the very talented designer who ran their Advertising and Visual Merchandising department. It was the best education I could have gotten. The department of two produced weekly newspaper ads, radio spots, TV commercials, and in-store displays and merchandising. This included the design and construction of some display fixtures. I then worked for six months for a carpet company, designing high end custom carpet. An odd job, but very interesting. It involved the design of custom one-of-a-kind rugs, which were then hand-made from our designs. This was followed by more than six years with a national commercial real estate publisher. For most of that time I was responsible for the training of production editors and designers. When I left I held the position of art director, though the actual job title they used was different. The last complete year I was there my department of three (including myself) was responsible for handling just over 2,300 ads. This included minor edits of existing ads , pre-press processing of client supplied ads, and creation of new advertising. While I was there I initiated a major revision of the production workflow, including a change in the brand style templates and software used. For the last two and a half years, I've been working for a major university in SW Virginia doing both print and web design work. Other random facts:

• I'm a member of NAPP.
• I served on the Administrative Websites Task Force which assisted in the rebranding efforts and website redesign of my university.
• I have worked on projects for professional athletes (active and retired), heads of nationally ranked companies, and one member of a royal family
• During part of my career, my design services were regularly billed at $150-300 per hour.

So yes, I do believe that I am reasonably well qualified to speak on the subject of design. Your should keep in mind though, that this is not in any way a business website. As I say on my homepage "This site is my online sketch book. A place to try new ideas, collect resources for my work, and write about design." This site is not now, and never has been intended to promote me as a freelance designer. It's a place where I try out ideas before I place them into the higher traffic sites that I maintain. The PHP scripts for RSS for instance, that I tried out here not too long ago has since been used in several other places with very good effect. I make no promises that this site will be in perfect working order with a high quality theme at any given time. Sometimes it will, and other times, maybe not. My only real long term goal is to promote discussion about graphic and web design among designers, people who work with designers, and people who should be working with designers. If, in the end, all I do is make people think about design, I'll be happy with that.

Good graphic design isn't complicated. Even fairly complex designs are, at their base, simple communication. While web design can be more technically challenging, it's also just a form of communication. An aspect of design that's often overlooked is this communication. You use the best paper, you've checked the latest color trends, your layout is perfect... does it communicate clearly? I'm passionate about design, but the wrong design can be worse than no design at all. When all is said in done, step back, look at your design again, and see it as if you've never seen it before. It's hard to do, but it needs to be done. Look at your design as if it was a story... is it good?, is it right?, is it complete? Does your design still say what you think it does? Most of the time it will, sometimes it won't. It's easy to let your preconceived ideas about a design cloud your judgment, and influence your design. To see the design based on your history with it, rather than what it currently is. To see how your perfect graphic matches a headline that the writer has since changed. To see a color choice based on a photo that's been replaced. Worst of all is to see something explained, by something you've removed. Never forget to step back and look at your design again... does it communicate clearly?

I've recently been playing with a free PHP Script. I'm incorporating a little of the dynamic content of the blog into the main page (since removed in an update) using a PHP script pulling in the RSS feed. It's a very user friendly set-up. The documentation leaves a little to be desired, and the sample template had to be completely redone for my use, but the actual script is quite impressive. If you're looking for this sort of thing, it's well worth your time. The superior quality of the script far outweighs the negatives of the documentation and template. To get the results I wanted, I changed the template file to PHP and removed all of the extraneous coding. Changing the template to PHP allowed me to remove a lot of the HTML in the template, making for cleaner ocde when it was pulled into the home page. Then all that was left was to add the proper CSS selectors and it was ready to go.