

Lessons Learned: A non-designer's attempt at a redesign - haon99
http://noahlitvin.posterous.com/lessons-learned

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JoelSutherland
Without question the number one thing novice designers don't understand is how
long it takes to create a good design. Even great designers that have years of
muscle-memory can spend hours upon hours on a design.

Novices generally don't appreciate this and just don't take enough time to
produce good work.

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zmmmmm
Replace "novice designer" with "people in general".

I've been having an ongoing fight with a colleague who insists we should redo
the design to a completely new theme before launch, with the rationale that
it's "ten lines of CSS".

Part of the problem is that one of the qualities of good design is that it
looks obvious and effortless. I have spent hours sometimes fine tuning micro-
details to get just the right feel. The result of these hours of work is that
it looks like it took less time rather than more - the longer I spend, the
less time people assume it took :-)

(FWIW, I'm no designer, just a developer who has to put that hat on every now
and then).

~~~
tjpick
and replace "good design" with "anything good".

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jcoop
I actually think your 1st design is far better than your 2nd.

Applying a bunch of dribbble.com trends to a website is not design, nor will
it do you any favours.

Here's a few examples: \- The image. The first one communicates your service.
The 2nd just freaks me out a little bit, what does it communicate? \- I like
how your original design was contained. It had a feeling of folders/filing
which reminded me of files/libraries. Now you're using 960.gs it's all a bit
scattered, particularly with the misaligned latin book and copy. -The only
element that stands out to me on the 2nd design is the copy in the footer.
This is useful to know and instantly communicates how effective your service
might be.

Your first design could use some improvements in a number of area's, mainly
the copy and UI. Yet you've focused the majority of your blogpost and redesign
on aesthetics.

Unfortunately you've gone from a web service that looks as though it was put
together by a developer, to a web service that looks like it was put together
by a developer and a terrible designer.

Looking at other web app's designs is the wrong way to design. Going on
dribbble will do you no favours. Look at your users and think, what will make
their visit more enjoyable/desirable/effective etc etc.

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rdamico
"Use gradients and drop shadows like salt and pepper."

This can work in some situations, but you should also be careful of over-using
these accents. If you look at a site like amazon.com, for example, you'll see
that they use solid colors and "flat" text more than gradients and drop
shadows.

~~~
jamesbritt
Gradients and drop-shadows require space to be effective.

Pages also need white space to help organize content and avoid crowding.

So, if you go with gradients or drop-shadows (or effects in that realm) know
that you're doing so at the expensive of a resource that adds readability and
overall usability.

That's not an argument against using these things, just an argument against
gratuitous application. (Consider that Amazon, for example, manages to get a
good deal of content on their pages while still being fairly easy to grok.)

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jeffclark
"Developing design skills is a summer project of it's own."

Correction: "Learning how to use Photoshop is a summer project of it's own".

I appreciate the linkbait and all, but saying you've developed sufficient
enough design skills after one site redesign is like saying you should be an
engineering manager because you developed your blog in Frontpage.

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jdminhbg
"saying you've developed sufficient enough design skills after one site
redesign"

He's developed sufficient enough design skills to make his site look better
than plain jane HTML. He's not claiming anything more.

There's nothing wrong with developing design skills over a summer -- I can
develop Python skills over a summer without claiming that I'll be correcting
Guido at the end of it.

This is hardly linkbait.

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David
I recently put something very like BookShout on my idea list... basically just
shareable, public, user-created lists of reference materials (books, websites,
whatever).

Looks like I don't have to build it anymore. =P

(My personal pain point was finding _ordered_ lists of materials -- taking you
from beginner to at least intermediate, produced by someone who knows what
they're doing. Fingers crossed that BookShout will expand in that direction.)

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raffi
I'm at the point now where I'll never design for my projects again. I've found
the talent available on odesk.com is amazing and for a negligible investment I
can have an amazing site to show my work in the best light. The cost is easily
justifiable as I'd rather spend the money on someone talented than waste time
doing something I suck at (and have no intention of becoming better).

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spitfire
I'm curious, how did you trawl through odesk to find a designer worth a damn?
The place is just overflowing with bodies, all of them (that I've seen)
completely talentless.

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raffi
The ones I used I searched for. I looked for keywords related to what I
wanted, found people, looked at their portfolio, and asked a few of them to
apply to my job posting.

I'm still new to it, but I've already worked with two designers, one psd
conversion guy, and an audio engineer. My experience with all of them was
positive enough that I plan to use the service again.

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Dramatize
Would the logo look nicer if it was a light colour? The logo and the main copy
text seem to fight for attention.

~~~
Dramatize
or make the middle background lighter. Edit: Try #ffefd0

~~~
Dramatize
Super quick example of what I mean:
<http://www.balloonagencies.com.au/bookshout.jpg> (typed browse too quick)

