Here are some of the main reasons many designers, including myself, suck:

• We’re expensive. Hiring a high-quality designer is going to cost you a lot of money. For a basic brochure-style website, I start my fees at about $800, and I’ve heard that’s on the cheaper side. Most people who have an idea for a website they’d like to make a reality don’t have the extra money to shell out for that idea. And even if you do, most of the time you’d be better to spend that money on other areas of your initiative.
• Design isn’t that important. The design of a site and how it’s built aren’t the most important parts of a site. The most important part of a site is the content you put into it. People come to your site because they’re looking for information. That information is what makes up the site’s content. While great design compliments and supports great content, great design can’t make up for shitty content. But great content can more than make up for shitty design. Just look at craigslist or StevePavlina.com.
• Most of you can do just as well without us. Most of you can make the site you need on your own. This article will show you how to do exactly that.

Instead of making a sales pitch on why you should shell out a grand for a site, I’ll show you how to create a high-quality, professional-level site for nearly free, with minimal technological know-how (if you can make your way through adding photos or writing a note on Facebook, you’ll have no problem making this site). Note that I didn’t say easy. Building a quality site will take some motivation and time, but you’ll come out of it with a website you’ve created yourself that’s got an edge over everyone else’s.

If you are a designer reading this, please share this advice with those who come to you and are considering building a site. I’ve been giving this advice to people for years, and instead of pushing clients away like most designers fear, it has built stronger relationships and generated more referrals than I could ever have imagined, as well as saved me from spending all my time on small projects, leaving my schedule open for bigger, more interesting, and more profitable projects. Both you and your clients can appreciate that.

Start with the right tools.

Instead of having a website custom built for you, which is both time consuming and expensive, there are services you can use that will make creating and running a website about as easy as using Facebook. The service that I would recommend is called WordPress. Maybe you’ve heard of WordPress as a blogging platform, but over the years it has grown into a full fledged content management system (CMS). Since WordPress is open source, meaning any developer or designer can add to it, it has evolved to do any range of tasks: from hosting a basic brochure-style site, to running full-out online stores. WordPress is one of the most powerful CMSs available, and it’s completely free to use.

One of the greatest benefits of WordPress is the vast amount of customizable themes and plugins available. A theme is the design of your site, how it looks and how the user navigates it. There are literally thousands, if not millions, of themes available for free, and very high quality ones available for relatively cheap. Most of them allow you to upload your own logo if you so choose, and modify the layout to suit your needs.

WordPress also has thousands of plugins. A plugin is an add-on that allows WordPress to do things it wouldn’t usually do. For instance, a basic WordPress install doesn’t have the ability to post your Twitter feed in your sidebar or host an online store. But there are plugins that let you do both those things. With plugins, there’s almost nothing you can’t do with WordPress.

Using WordPress is dead simple. All you need to do is login, choose and customize your theme, and add and edit pages much like you would in Facebook. It’s really that easy.

Now, I’m not going to walk  you through how to install and use WordPress, because there are already tons of guides that explain that better than I ever could. What I will give you though is a list of services that will host a WordPress site for you, and link you to some good guides to get you started using WordPress.

These are the two hosting services I recommend:

• WordPress.com is a great place to try WordPress out. They have a free option and a $17/year option for hosting. Functionally, both options are the same, but the free option will be www.yoursite.wordpress.com, while the $17/year option will be www.yoursite.com. The free option is great if you want to try using WordPress but aren’t ready to commit yet. Both require very little set up, but you’ll be restricted to only a couple hundred themes, and you won’t be able to use plugins. This option is best if you’re not that tech savvy or just want to try the service out.
• HostPapa.com is my hosting provider of choice. They’ve got a variety of plans that range between $4-12/month and have excellent customer support. WordPress comes pre-installed and you can use any theme or plugin, though it’ll take the tiniest bit of tech savvy to upload them. Since HostPapa is a full fledged hosting service, you’ll be able to evolve past a WordPress site in the future if you so choose. This option is best if you’re comfortable doing basic file uploading, are committed to putting up a site, or want to have the ability to expand the scope of the project in the future.

As for starting guides, check these out:

• Most of the best resources are WordPress’s own. Their First Steps with WordPress article is where I recommend you start. If you’re content is not going to change much, you’ll want to get familiar with pages. If you’re going to be putting out content on a regular basis, like a blog or magazine, you’ll want to get familiar with posts. For any and all other information, check out the rest of their instructional articles.
• Another good resource to check out is WPBeginner.com. They’ve got guides and tutorials on almost everything WordPress.

In case you’re worried that using WordPress could be seen as unprofessional, stop worrying. This site is powered by WordPress. So are sites by Ford, the Wall Street Journal, Samsung, and a slew of other major companies.

If you have any questions about WordPress, how to set it up, or how to use it, put them in the comments or email me and I’ll give you a hand. If somewhere down the road you think you need a custom theme made for you, give me a shout, I’d be stoked to put one together for you. Switching to a custom theme is easy and you can preserve all of your original content.

Give your site some real value.

As I mentioned before, design isn’t that important. That’s why you can get away with a pre-made theme and still have a quality site. What is important is the content you put on your site. There’s a reason you wanted to build a site, and that reason was to share some sort of information. Whether it’s information about your business, information about you, or just information you think everyone should know, you’ve got to turn that information into some sort of meaningful and valuable content for your readers. And since no one knows that information better than you, there are few people better qualified to write that content.

Creating valuable content out of the information you want to provide isn’t just a matter of writing a few paragraphs and slapping them onto a page. People build entire careers out of knowing how to craft content to provide valuable information, entertain the reader, and sell the service it’s promoting. Now I’m not expecting you to sweat content creation that much, but I would suggest taking a look at some of these guides on writing quality content so you have a basic knowledge of what works and have an edge on everybody else.

Here are a couple guide that I frequently reference while writing:

• Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101 series is the place I go when I need a refresh in the basics. Although it’s geared more towards sales copy, the suggestions apply to almost all writing for the web. You have to use some sense when applying them though, as some of the tactics they suggest have been used poorly so many times that users have become desensitized to them. To make sure you’re not using them poorly, read your content out loud to yourself and see if it sounds like something you would hear people say in everyday conversation. If it sounds overly sales-pitch-like, I’d say you should try to get it sounding more natural.
• I don’t know where I came across Joshua Sowin’s Guide to Writing Well, but I’m glad I did. This guide is considerably more in depth than Copyblogger’s, but it’s really worth a read if you need to do any sort of lengthy writing.
• You can add me to the list of people who recommend everyone get a copy of Strunk and White’s the Elements of Style. You’ve got to know the rules before you break them, and Strunk and White lay out the rules better than anyone.

One key step: PROOFREAD! Once you’ve drafted your content, make sure to read it allowed to yourself and have someone else read it over as well. Work on any bits that you have to read twice to understand, or that confuse whoever’s reading it for you.

Remember when I said there are areas that are better than design to spend your money on? Well, if the idea of writing your own content terrifies you, sounds daunting, or you just really want high quality professionally crafted content, this might be one of the areas you’ll want to consider spending money on (note that content creation is one of the many things I do!).

If you have some content you’ve created yourself and would like a professional to go over it, I’d love to help. Just shoot me an email with the content you’ve created or a link to your site, and I’ll give you my honest feedback and suggestions, free.

Note about SEO: If you put the effort into maintaining your website and making it worthwhile, you’ll no doubt run into SEO tactics at some point. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and SEO tactics are tactics for trying to get your site to show up more in search engine results like Google. While this might sound all well and good, 99% of the tactics out there are snake oil. They are spammy, out-dated attempts at stuffing keywords into unnecessary places, and Google actually penalizes your site for using them. So a word of caution: don’t try any SEO tactics without the advice of a web professional.

Some design tips.

Although you probably don’t need a designer for your site, you can definitely benefit from some of our professional advice. If you follow these basic tips, your site will be head and shoulders above the competition.

• Make sure your contact information is on every page. All of us have wasted enough of our lives searching for phone numbers on a website. Save your users time, and make sure your phone number, email, or preferred method of content is conveniently displayed on every page.
• A bigger font size is better than a smaller one. If you have to lean in to read the screen, the font is too small. You can never be certain of a user’s quality of eye sight, so it’s better to play it safe with a big font. 16px is a good size to start with.
• Avoid weird shit. People often conflate being unique with being weird. Just look at most teenagers. Weirdos, right? That’s just their attempt at being unique. When it comes to your site, being weird can make your site unattractive and hard to use. Users have certain expectations of a site. They expect the logo to be in the top left side of the page and they expect the navigation to be along the top or down the left side of the page. Failure to comply with these expectations (us designers call them patterns) cause the user unnecessary confusion. Here are some good patterns to follow:
  • Use dark text on light background.
  • Stick to a plain, readable font, like Helvetica or Georgia.
  • Make sure your links are underlined and a different colour than the rest of the text.
  • Avoid things that are unnecessary or distracting, like music, flashing text and images, and splash screens.
• Keep your brand in mind. Your brand is what comes to mind when someone mentions you or your company. It includes your logo, your slogan, and the feel of everything you produce. I like to think of it as your personality. Take a moment to think about what your personality is, and try to convey that in your content and design.
• For bonus points, consider learning some HTML and CSS. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and is the language used to structure information in a website. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and is the language used to style that information. It’s pretty easy to learn the basics of both languages, and can give you control over small aspects of your site that you otherwise wouldn’t have control over.

Like I said with the content, if you want me to go over your site’s design and give you my honest feedback and suggestions for free, just shoot me an email.

When you should hire a designer.

If us designers were completely useless, none of us would have jobs. But that’s not the case. There are plenty of reasons why you would need to hire a designer. A good indicator that you’ll need a designer is that you haven’t understood this article at all, or that you think your site surpasses the scope of what this article has laid out.

If you’re still on the fence about whether you need a designer or not, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you want your site to do more than just convey information?
• Is your site going to be a key part of a serious marketing effort?
• Are you developing a cohesive and extensible brand?
• Have you hired other marketing professionals?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you should look at hiring a designer. These are situations when it’s best to bring in a professional who knows the ins and outs of what makes a site work and sell. So if your site is going to have an online store, if it’s going to be the make-or-break point between you and potential customers, or if it’s going to be part of a greater marketing plan, I’d definitely recommend hiring a designer. Naturally, I’d suggest you give me a shout to help you with your project, but if another designer pointed you to this article in the first place, I definitely suggest you see what they can do for you. Obviously they know their stuff if they sent you here!

In closing.

With motivation and time, you can make yourself a quality site that won’t cost you much. And if that sounds like too much work for you, you can always hire me or another designer to do it. Hey, we may suck, but somebody’s got to do it.

So what do you think, has this made up for all that sucking of days past? Put you’re questions and feedback in the comments and I’ll hit you back!

Oh yea, and you can always return the favour of all this wonderful advice by sharing it on the social network of your choice. Thanks much!

Problem #1: Virtual hosts aren’t working at all!

So you’ve set up your hosts file, your httpd-vhosts.conf (just httpd.conf with older Apache installations) points to the right folder, you’ve restarted your server, and your browser is still telling you that the site cannot be found. Another developer on my team and I spent a whole day trying to figure this one out. So how do you fix it? Let me explain what’s going on first.

MAMP uses port 8888 for its server, and when you enter a URL without a port specified, it assumes the port is 80. So you’re looking for it on port 80, when it exists on port 8888. So you try specifying port 8888 by typing “yourvirtualhost:8888″ into your address bar, and voila, you’ve got a page! But it’s probably not the page you want. For me, it was a page from MAMP that says your virtual host is set up and you can begin adding files. My guess is this is how MAMP Pro works when you configure virtual hosts through its interface, and since you’re working around its interface, it’s gonna be a pain.

So to fix this, and to save you from having to specify the port every time you want to access your server, open up httpd.conf in /MAMP/conf/apache/ and change

Listen 8888

to

Listen 80

(in my installation, this is on line 48).

Problem #2: My .htaccess files aren’t working

I sorta kicked myself when I figured out what was going on with this one and I have a feeling you’ll do the same. MAMP is set up for you to put your files in /MAMP/htdocs/. If you’re like me, you’d much rather have your sites in a more convenient location, like ~/Sites/. But MAMP doesn’t like this, and if you set up your sites outside of htdocs, you’ll notice that none of the things you defined in your .htaccess files will be working. Easy fix. Crack open httpd.conf again, and you’ll find a line that says something like

<Directory "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/">

with the line

AllowOverride All

somewhere before the closing directory tag. In my installation, this can be found from line 212-240. What this does is specify that Apache settings can be overriden by .htaccess files within that directory.

There’s two ways to fix this:

1) Change the path within the directory tag to the path of the directory you keep your sites in. This becomes less than optimal when you have multiple directories that you keep sites in.

2) You can remove the Directory tag and its closing counterpart. This will cause the contained options to apply to the global Apache settings. This may be an issue if there are settings contained in this tag that you don’t want applied globally.

Last thoughts

These problems weren’t existent when I had previously installed MAMP, so I’m figuring they’re a recent addition. I’m gonna make the guess that they were implemented to try and get more people to buy MAMP Pro, though that’s pure speculation and I would hate to start a vicious rumor. I hope that this guide has been helpful, and if you are having or have had other problems when trying to set up MAMP, let me know and I’ll do my best to help and then add the solution to this article.

My Brain

I don’t use this one as often as I should, but when I do, I tend to get some pretty good results. I highly recommend trying yours out. If yours is broken, or doesn’t work as well as it used to, borrow a friend’s.

Sketch Pad and Pencil

I’m not gonna lie, I sort of have a deep seated hatred for Photoshop and most other Adobe products (It’s not you Adobe, It’s me). The longer I can spend without touching it, the better. I like to have a small stack of sketches before I even turn on my MacBook. If you can get stoked on a design while it’s still on paper, then it’s gonna make the whole process that much more enjoyable.

MacBook Pro

It’s shiny, it’s sturdy, and every hipster in every coffee shop has one. I’ve got the 17″ display one with the 1GB of dedicated graphics RAM, if you were at all curious.

Logitech Performance Mouse MX

I didn’t realize that a man could have feelings for a mouse, but it has happened. This thing is comfy as hell, has the smoothest scroll wheel in the world, and tracks on any surface, including glass. Although the price tag hovers around $100, I don’t regret spending any of it.

AiAiAi TMA-1 Headphones

I can’t work without music. It helps keep my concentration when working in a noisy environment, and let’s face it: Dr. Dre designs beats better than I could ever hope to design a website. So naturally, there’s no better place to look for inspiration. Rated in CNET’s top 5 headphone picks, these things are crisp, clear, not too bassy, and comfy to wear for prolonged periods. They’re not noise cancelling, but they may as well be. The $200 price tag makes them rather attractive as well.

Pathfinder

Pathfinder completely changed how I use my Mac. It replaces the standard Mac Finder, and is hundreds of times more powerful. Here’s a basic list of things it does: tabbed windows, split pane browsing, breadcrumbs, integrated Subversion and Terminal window, easily switch hidden files on and off, Drop Stack for moving multiple files, and that’s just scratching the surface. It costs $40, but it’s worth every penny, and this is coming from the guy who pirates EVERYTHING.

SCPlugin and svnx

SCPlugin fully integrates Subversion into your file browser, and svnx does everything that SCPlugin can’t. Together, they’re the closest you can get to TortoiseSVN on a Mac.

Komodo Edit

I spent a good while testing out code editors, and Komodo Edit takes the cake. It’s free, incredibly customizable, has libraries and autosuggests for every coding language you can think of, has tabs and split pane editing, has in window file browsing, and is just generally a wonderful tool. The support team is great, and they have a full IDE version for purchase if you’re interested as well. In short, it’s the bomb.

Google Chrome

It’s fast, it’s sleek, and I’m a sucker for Google products. The minimalist feel to it is great. The WebKit layout engine is the least buggy one out there and the Javascript engine it uses is very speedy. The built in web development tools are killer, and paired with Pendule, you’re flying. Plus, it’s got some nice extensions too, here’s a few I can’t live without: Gmail Checker, Xmarks, Pendule, Eye Dropper, and Awesome Screenshot (Makes a screen cap of the ENTIRE web page!)

Photoshop & Illustrator vs. GIMP & Inkscape

So, just like the rest of you, I’ve been using Adobe tools for my whole design career. But when I got my new laptop, I didn’t feel like spending the money to purchase the software, nor did I feel like spending the effort to acquire the software through less legitimate means. So, I started fooling around with GIMP and Inkscape. So far, the learning curve is a little high, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Even if I do go back to the cruel mistress that is Adobe, at least I’ll get to say I experimented with open-source a little in college like everyone else. I’ll make a post about my experimentation when I’ve come to a decision.

Evernote

Evernote did to my organization, productivity, and creativity what Newton did to gravity. Evernote is a note taking application that I use to take notes (duh), keep track of to do lists, store business cards and contact info, organize ideas as they come up, and store links to useful web resources. It syncs across everything, and has type recognition, so you can just take a picture of your hand written notes with your phone, and then search them with Evernote later. Best of all, it’s free!

MAMP

MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is a god send. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s an app that makes hosting a server locally dead simple. Flip a switch and go. I use it to set up development domains on my computer to test my sites. You can also set it up so clients can take a look at the progress you’re making. Free and paid versions.

Cyber Duck

Great FTP Client. Does it’s job, and does it well.

VirtualBox

It’s no secret: Internet Explorer is the bane of the web desinger’s existence. It’s an even bigger piss off for designers who use Macs, because we have few ways to test in IE. Luckily, using VirtualBox, you can run Windows right in your Mac, and can even set it up to access your local server. I’ll be writing an article on this, and other methods of testing IE on a Mac, a bit later.

Tons of Web Design Digests

While fooling around with the specifics of a design, I peruse through as many designs as I can to see what I like and don’t like about them, and then try to pull all the awesome bits into my new design. Tweet My Design, Web Design Ledger, Design Melt Down and Thinking For a Living are some of my favourite places to go for ideas.

Color Tools

Sometimes finding the right color palette is waaaaayyyyy harder than it should be. When backed up into such a pigmatic predicament, I like to turn to a color tool and play around until I find a palette I like. Check out Color Scheme Designer and ColoRotate.

What The Font?

Ever wondered what that font was? Then upload it to What The Font? and you’ll know!

CSS3 Please!

It’s hard to keep track of all the new fangled CSS3 tags for all the different browsers. This handy little webpage creates all the code for you. It even gives you code for gradients in IE. Weird…

Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Keyword Tool

I get it: I’m a Google whore. But that doesn’t stop these tools from being AMAZINGLY helpful. I do some basic SEO research and implementation on all my sites, and since Google is the biggest search engine out there, it makes sense to use their tools to help get you hits. Before I sit down to write any copy, I always do some thorough research of possible keywords using the keyword tool. Later, once the site’s up, I track my position for those keywords in Webmaster tools, and the amount of hits using analytics. It’s a wonderful system, really.

HostPapa.ca

Awesome hosting, reasonable prices, great support team, Canadian owned and run entirely off green energy.

GMail, Skype, and Adium

You’ve got to keep in contact with clients somehow.

Google Docs

Perfect for writing up web copy. Don’t have to worry about sending it back and forth with a client, you guys can just share permissions to the file and work on it together (Always keep a back up though, clients can be zealous).

WordPress

You want a blog? I’ll give you a blog! Easy to use, looks great, and easy to make themes for. Hey, I’m using it right now!

And that’s about it! Congratulations for reading through that whole post, hopefully you learned something about a new application that’ll help you out. Maybe you only garnered that I was lacking ideas for a blog post. Maybe you decided to get a Google account (Very good idea). Whatever the reason, I thank you, and assure you my next post will be more interesting.

I had the chance to put my design skills to the test for my Introduction to Social Work class. We were asked to do a paper on a movie, along with a creative project. I chose American History X as my film, and made this poster. Credits to Olly Moss for the idea.

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” ~ the Book of Job 38:4-7, KJB

“God is in the Details.” ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

For a while there, there were two things that completely dominated my curiosity and imagination: Design and Religion. Being a designer by trade, a fascination with design is to be expected, but seeing how I’m not a religious person, a fascination with religion is unexpected, if not flat out weird. Despite their apparent differences, I see them both sharing similarities. I’ve done no formal studying of either of them, so I’m not an authoritative voice, but what follows is food for thought.

Were I to put a definition to design (Which I’m hesitant on doing), I would say that design is the greater impression of an accumulation of details, with each detail being a purposeful and integral attribute of the whole design. Design is in the details. Design is the details. But design is still greater than the sum of its details. The design would not be the design were it not for every little individual detail, but at the same time, the details would have no inherent meaning or purpose were it not for the greater design.

Were I to put a definition to God (Which I’m hesitant on doing), I would say that God is the greater impression of an accumulation of details, with each detail being a purposeful and integral attribute of God (Or of God’s creation). God is in the details. God is the details. But God is still greater than the sum of its details. God would not be God were it not for every little individual detail, but at the same time, the details would have no inherent meaning or purpose were it not for God.

What I’m trying to say here, other than demonstrate the power of search and replace, is that design can expand beyond something we do to make a buck, and begin to situate itself as a way of life. I may be just grasping at straws here, but please, bear with me.

Being your typical West Coast-er, when I get stoked on religious stories, they’re usually ones from the Far East: Of Bodhidharma wandering into to China from India, Of Krishna consoling Arjuna, Of how Ganesha got his elephant head. So it’s a little odd for me to refer to the Good Book. But here, it seems apt. After being plagued with boils due to a sort of cosmic bet between God and Satan, the ever-faithful Job curses the day he was born and pleads to God to explain why He allowed something so terrible occur to someone so righteous. God then reproaches Job by asking him: Were you there when the Universe was made? How do you know about what is and what isn’t righteous? God goes on to very poetically ask whether Job knows how all the little details in the Universe work, like how water turns to ice and how the eagles fly. “Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? Canst thou number the months that they fulfil? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth?” In all this, God is not only asserting the power and integrity of all these details, but He’s also reminding Job that he is a detail which relies on God for meaning in all of it. God is not complete without Job. Job is purposeless without God.

When I have a web design in which I manage to get the footer or the bullets just right, when I manage to find that perfect balance in which the element is distinct in itself but still contributing to the purpose of the whole of the design, I feel like I can see that grand scale, of both design and God. I can see how it all fits together, and how it’s possible that I may be that standalone bullet within the Design of Life. I may be purposeless without the Design, but the Design falls apart without me, or you, or your grandma, or your dog…

So next time you curse at your computer screen because you just can’t get that bullet right, remember: God is in the Details.

Project after agonizing project I would continue with this cycle of doubt, until one day I could stand it no longer. I made the choice to see my designs through with confidence, and discover what they looked like in the end prior to deciding whether to scrap it or not. Initially, I thought I’d be spending a lot more time working this way, but I’d more than make up for it in saved sanity. But, it turned out to save sanity and time. Since I’ve revised my process, I’ve never started a project over more than once (As opposed to the 5-15 times I would start things over in the past). After seeing the first cut of a website sitting in my browser, I’m less likely to see it as a hunk of loosely affiliated garbage as I would in the steps working towards that first cut, but rather a rough diamond with certain parts that need to be buffed up prior to it’s glistening potential to be reached. And then I get to shining.

This probably isn’t all that new. You can hear the sentiments of this philosophy everywhere. The place that I can think of it being most prominent for me is in the Think-then-do concept in Ben Hunt‘s wonderful treatise on web design, Save the Pixel. Here’s my paraphrasing of Hunt’s concept: Your brain’s best at doing one thing at a time (At least for the male side of the species). So why boggle it by trying to do more than one thing at a time? In your conceptualizing and planning phase, allow your brain to take on the role of manager and designer, coming up with what the site is going to look like, and how it is going to work. But once you sit down in front of Photoshop or a code editor, your brain becomes a worker and does what the manager has told it to do. When the worker is second guessing his work (Doing the manager’s job), things are bound to go awry. Despite reading that book quite a while ago, that particular part of it only recently sunk in.

So that’s confidence in designing. What about confidence in the design itself? Too often have designs of late been tormented by being watered down with omnipresent gradients and excessive noise filters. Why not allow a design to be bold and brash, with square corners and solid colours? (Does it count for alliteration when it’s two pairs of words with the same respective first letters like that?) In the past, when I wasn’t happy with a design and didn’t know entirely what to do, I’d just toss in some gradients and soften up some of the colours and voila, I’d call it good to go. This isn’t because these things are the magic antidote that will save any design from peril. It’s because the design still had some parts that sucked, and by turning down it’s boldness and volume, you were turning down the suck. It’s like trying to make life more bearable by turning down that new Katie Perry track, when really, you should probably just toss in some Souls of Mischief (I’m in an alternative west coast mood this morning).

This doesn’t mean that the design should be scrapped all together (See: the first half of this article), but rather the design still needs to be buffed up a bit. It’s useless to look at a design as though it’s worthless, when it’s just a rough diamond that needs to be shined to perfection. When I play around with the design a bit, and maybe inject certain parts with the confidence that they’re lacking, I can almost always find the tootsie roll center amongst the hard sour candy. And even when I’m not quite seeing it, sometimes getting a friend or colleague to look at it can show me that it’s not as bad as I think. A design is always going to look more heavy handed to the designer who made it.

I’m going to assume that none of this is new information, or at least it shouldn’t be. I just figure it’s something that needs to be said more often. Have confidence in the things you make, and wait til you can see the whole picture until you decide whether to continue working with it or not. It has definitely saved me hours of frustration and the last specs of my sanity.

Note: I don’t want to come off as thinking that gradients, round corners, noise filters, and soft colours are evil. They’re just as useful tools as anything else in a designer’s arsenal. It just seems that lately they’ve become a bit of a crutch, and I think that we, as web designers, need to start working with them less. It’s easier to code without them, it’s less time spent in photoshop, and a design will almost always seems stronger and less distracted without them.