Report on the Meaning of the Moment

This week one of my clients sent me an email, responding to some design comps I had sent. The gist of the email was this:

. . .these look too much like websites.

Fighting my initial impulse to pound out a reply “They are websites,” I took a minute to think about what she was saying. In the first place, she was right. They did look like websites, but that wasn’t what she was really saying. What she was saying was that the designs I sent her looked too much like any other website. They were nice, well designed, very detailed and otherwise utterly boring. When did we get to the point where everything looks like everything else? I look around on the web and it’s much worse than just a handful of design trends that are being repeated over and over. There is this sense of despair. It’s almost like web designers are feeling so uninspired, design is following the API mashup trend and we’re seeing some pretty strange looking stuff. Hey, if this looks good and this looks good, they’ll look good together…

Needless to say, and I’ll say this really big so everyone can hear, design is not about making things look pretty, it’s about solving problems. Conventions are important in UI design and standards are important in development, so how do we ,as designers of the Intergallactic Super Throughway, continue to come up with original stuff that doesn’t look like everyone else’s original stuff?

Lacking in sufficient inspiration, I turned to the place designers go to fake it, and borrowed the title for this piece from a friend and colleague, Deric Carner, who produces a monthly studio newsletter Report On The Meaning Of The Moment.

The focus of this newsletter is precisely to tackle the inspiration conundrum, or at least it effectively serves this purpose. A while back I touched a little on the topic of design inspiration, in making the design. I’d like to revise my position about finding inspiration for web design. Get the hell away from the computer!

I say this as someone who has been known to stare myself into a glow of stagnation before my monitor. Trust me, you need to be able to step away and give your mind breathing room. Maybe its the nature of the industry or maybe it’s subject to the kind of people the industry attracts, but (and I guarantee I’m paler than you) web designers and developers need to get out of doors more often, as a whole. Make that planned day trip. The sun looks scary, but trust me, we really are far enough away from it. It doesn’t hurt (too bad).

Tactical Swirves

So getting back to my “these look too much like websites comment”, I had two choices. One, get frustrated, then irate and declare, “how can these people be so impossible, I’m a web designer” (and then post the whole sorted story on Clientcopia). Or two, I could take a moment and step away from the computer and think about it.

I of course chose the latter, though Clientcopia was once a viable alternative. The problem now, was how to set in on a new round of designs, without feeling completely stifled by the preceding feedback. This is a real slip cog for designers and it’s probably the hardest part of what we do, so I thought I’d break the process down and hopefully give you some tangible goals for the next time you sit down to design.

Getting Started

Having a clear set of goals is essential when starting a design from scratch. Kevin Cornell has outlined this beautifully in his recent A List Apart Article Staying Motivated.

Keeping interested and motivated is directly related to those successfully met goals.
-Kevin Cornell, Keeping Motivated

I can’t stress the importance of this enough. If having goals is important when starting from scratch, it’s even more critical when your avenues have all been seemingly cut-off by client feedback. Being able to meet these goals is what is going to see you out of this closed alley.

Take a hike

A list of manageable tasks is in order, but you still need to fight that urge to tell your client to take a hike. Maybe not literally, but you get the idea. This is where I might suggest something that may at first seem counter productive and, under tight time constraints, could easily be out of the question. But what I suggest, and this is mainly to break out of “wrote” thinking, is – Do something fun. It’s that simple. Put your work aside and just do something you’ve been wanting to do, but haven’t made the time for in the past.

Stepping outside of your work helps free the mind. If you’re anything like me, no sooner than doing this yourself, the ideas will start pouring in. You may be tempted to run back to the computer, thinking the blockage has passed, but trust me, fight that urge if this happens to you. The new ideas aren’t going to go away. Jot them down if you need to (which reminds me,always carry a note pad), but give yourself the separation you need. You’ll come back fresher and more inspired if you do.

If you are still finding yourself in a slump, become more aggressive in your seeking of distraction. Get some friends together and go roll old tires down the downtown city streets. Now I don’t actually advocate doing this. It’s not for everyone, especially not the people who might get it by said tires. Maybe start with something a little less perilous, like a snow cone fight or even a drink at your local dive.