Designing for… Yourself
Meetings, specs, meetings, prototypes, more meetings… Our jobs as designers revolve around designing for clients and employers. Yet, there comes a time when we realize our self-promotional materials really need a makeover. I recently re-designed my website that had the same look for the last 5 years.
Designing for yourself is both easier and harder. Easier, for the obvious reason that you have nobody to answer to, nobody to justify your decisions to. It's like a breath of fresh air. You can just do what you want. Harder, because a client's requests, guidelines, and input are like a starting point, or a map. In a way it's easier to just follow the map, than play Lewis and Clark, exploring new territory.
Yet, the freedom and the thrill of exploration made it the best design experience I've had since… I initially designed my site. I'd like to hear about your experiences designing for yourself.
Designing for yourself is the most enjoyable -yet toughest job you will ever do. There is no client that is going to be as hard on you as you are on yourself.
Insofar as a beginning point- first comes the technology.
Athyrius.com has gone through about 5 design changes over the past 5 years. Right now the site is simple css/html. We deliberately developed it this way for now as we have been waiting through the new Joomla updates. We are very supportive of that community and very excited about the new developments. Since we have decided on the backbone technology the next step is the color scheme. Once we have that down we will start playing with structural layout, and decide on what kind of toys to incorporate- such as flash.
So that is basically our three step process.