For the past couple of months, I have been busy designing and developing a website for my friend Ryan’s band, Ephesus. The site has finally launched – please check it out!

As this is one of the first sites I have designed myself in a long time, I wanted it to be good. When I get in designing mode, I find that what looked great to me the night before looks like crap the following morning. I have no formal training in design other than all the books and websites I’ve read, and what may take a professional designer 6 hours may end up taking me 3 days. I don’t mind, though, as it’s always a great learning process. The one thing I’ve learned from every design project I’ve done, though, is that things can always be better. I’d like to use the Ephesus site as an example. Here is the first mockup I sent Ryan back in early January:

Not very pretty, eh? It looked great to me at the time (after 4 hours of messing in Photoshop, at least). After sitting on it for awhile, I came up with mockup number 2 in early February:

Better. I still felt like it was missing something, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I put the design on hold for the time being while I worked on the content/functionality of the site. Then one day in late April, it hit me. I knew exactly what it was missing, and I came up with this:

Now, that’s more like it. As I was driving home one day, I realized that I needed to incorporate more “hand drawn” elements into the template to go along with Ephesus’ signature hand-drawn guitar logo that I used in the background. I also wanted to incorporate some Polaroid photos to go along with their jacket art on their CD, and doing this allowed me to free up some room at the top and position the sidebar differently. Of course, I’m sure even this layout could be loads better, but I’m pretty happy with it, considering it’s my first major design in about 2 years.

Lesson learned (in case you didn’t get it above): things can always be better!

In my last post I discussed whether or not design/creativity is something that can be learned, and thus decided to test the theory on myself by going through the steps outlined in Elliot Jay Stocks’ new book, Sexy Web Design. My friend Steve has kindly allowed me to use his current portfolio for the experiment (lucky him!). So, let’s begin.

The first step to Sexy Web Design is Research – something I admittedly don’t spend much time on. The only research I tend to do involves asking the client which websites they like, although I was happy to find out that this is indeed an important element. However, one element I don’t spend much time thinking about is, “What exactly should the website DO?”

Fortunately, I was able to get quite a lot of information from Steve when finding out what he wanted to accomplish with his portfolio:

• Blog for posting ideas, projects, articles, thoughts
• About page with information on who Steve is and what he does
• Project page with links to all his current and past projects which will include screenshots and additional information
• Homepage to include callouts to recent projects, recent blog entries, etc

As well as a list of sites he liked and why:

• http://www.cssjockey.com/ – navigation
• http://css-tricks.com/ – footer, simple design
• http://marcgrabanski.com/ – page layout
• http://www.netdreams.co.uk/index.php/what-we-do/ – colors
• http://crushlovely.com/ – footer, colors, navigation
• http://www.45royale.com/ – page layout
• http://orderedlist.com/ – colors, page layout

With very little design experience, Steve did what he could to showcase his work in a professional and simple manner. Since then, Steve’s focus has changed from wanting to purely showcase his work to also wanting a place to include his thoughts and other ongoing projects, all with a much less formal look. In the end, I will not only be designing his website, but most likely also establishing other elements of his online identity. While Steve has given me almost complete creative freedom, he did have some other thoughts on what he would like to see with the design:

• Simple, less formal
• Incorporate skiing somehow – also highlight other elements of Steve’s personality
• Footer style containing random information (Twitter, copyright, etc)
• Look AWESOME (I’m glad he cleared this up)

My next step will involve Wireframing – another element of design I rarely take into account. Stay tuned!

I recently came across an article at PSDTuts titled “50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory” which was interesting because it got me thinking – can good design be learned? If everyone has the potential to design, what separates the good designers from the bad ones? Can those principles be learned?

I don’t see myself as an incredibly creative person, nor a good designer. If design can be learned, can creativity? Is creativity essential to being a good designer?

I’ve decided to test this idea on myself.

I recently purchased Elliot Jay Stock’s new book, “Sexy Web Design.” The book is fantastic, and covers the steps one should take when designing a web site. I must admit – in most of my design attempts, I’ve skipped a lot of important steps (researching, wireframing, and sitemapping to name a few) and gone straight to the Photoshop design. I’m now wondering… if I take these pre-design steps, will my designs improve? By learning a few tricks and techniques, will someone look at my web site and think, “Wow, that’s hot!”?

My friend Steve has graciously (or stupidly) allowed me to redesign his portfolio web site. My experiment will take me through all the steps outlined in Elliot’s book, which I will be documenting here (not the actual content of the book – go buy it yourself if you want to know!).

Stay turned for Step 1: Research.