Designing for yourself
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Some people see the word constraint as a negative. Personally, I use constraints as a way to free myself from a lot of “what if” scenarios and focus on getting things done.
Where to start
I’ve been struggling through the process of re-designing my own site for quite some time now. I know it sounds strange. I can spend all the time I want, incorporate anything I desire, and have it look any way I could possibly imagine. How can I go wrong with that?!
Therein was the problem: unlimited possibility.
Examples of the issue
Pretend for a moment that you’re a talented movie producer and you’ve got an unlimited budget, a flexible schedule and all the greatest actors begging to work for you. With so much talent and potential handed to you, you might think that you’ve got a successful movie pretty much in the bag already. On the other hand, you could come up with a movie like Spiderman 3 or Pearl Harbor.
Ok, erase all that. You’re still a talented movie producer, but you’ve got almost no budget, a short timetable and one great actor. With more constraints, you’ve gotta get creative. A great movie doesn’t sound so easy all of a sudden. Primer was a very good movie made for $7,000 but some more famous examples would be the first Rocky movie, Mad Max or even The Blair Witch Project.
First steps
I soon realized that without constraints, there was no way I was ever going to get anything done. So I went about setting some up.
Identify your priorities
What do you want to have on your site? Is it going to be for work and business relations or is it for your Russian nesting doll collection? The more specific and detailed your priorities list is, the quicker you can get to finding a solution. Remember that this isn’t cast in stone. You can add features at a later date. We’re primarily interested in getting the ball rolling here.
Identify your assets
This is more about identifying what you’ve currently got in terms of media and content than it is about future planning. Again, you’re taking stock of what you got now. Leave provisions for future additions, but don’t let them stop you from getting things started.
Set a time limit
Time limits keep you from pursuing too many wild ideas and gives you a deadline to shoot for. Be reasonable with your deadline. I try to define mine in hours rather than a date in the future.
Incorporate something new
Try to incorporate one new technology, language, or principle. But only one thing. Focusing on learning one new thing will keep you focused on that task. Also, if you’ve set a time limit for yourself, you won’t have time to immerse yourself in multiple new ideas.
How I attained my goals
I’ve got a blog (which you’re reading), a twitter account and a flickr account that I wanted tied into one page that would be a sort of summary for my online presence. I knew I was going to be utilizing the RSS feeds from each of these sites, so I researched and found a PHP solution called SimplePie that allowed me to import my RSS feeds. I then gave myself two hours to sketch, mock up, and prepare the layout and another hour for the CSS. The SimplePie setup went a lot smoother than I anticipated and in no time, I had a site up and running.
Did it look exactly the way I wanted it to? No. But it was about 90% of the way there which is about 75% closer than it has ever been in the past. By giving myself some guidelines and a target, I was able to get something done.
Category Art, Design, FYI, Word of Wisdom | Tags:
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