Real simple, I mean it!
Documenting some sort of epiphany in my process as a visual designer… I’m not sure of how long the thought will last, so it’s important to quickly write it down to remind myself… before I continue producing poopoo designs for my own use. It’s true. When it comes to doing any design work for mafemaria.com, I become my WORST NIGHTMARE client. I don’t get it. It doesn’t go like that with MQStudio or with any client project. It’s just this site…
This time, I actually came up with my list of problems to solve, and I’ve kept checking these design goals all along. But I missed one thing: visual goals. I didn’t write these down, but started designing with an implicit goal to produce something great and wonderful… Something extremely creative… Something that would represent me, and reflect my skills as a designer. Instead, I came up with some rococo design which I initially liked. But now that I’ve started coding it, suddenly it looks dark and opulent, and dense, and passé… Nothing at all like I want it. Nothing at all like my house… I stopped for a second and thought: I don’t really like this, and I hate having to recode my whole web site again.
So here it goes: I want it simple. It’s so funny: “subtle” and “clean” are the two most recurring adjectives people use to describe my design work. Clients pick me precisely because of that. So how come I can’t keep it simple when I’m designing my own personal web site? Why am I putting myself through such amount of pressure, when what I most enjoy lately is writing posts and creating playground entries… I just realized that I don’t want my blog’s design to become this huge project that feels like work. I don’t want to recode the whole thing. I simply need to solve some issues — well… and add a photo gallery… no big deal.
As a celestial sign of agreement, today, precisely as I was thinking all this, Cameron Moll linked to a coincidentially relevant article: “The Propensity for Density”. YES!!!!!!… Let’s see what I can come up with… This time: Simple, please. I mean it.
