A Designer’s Work Is Never Done
Aug 30th, 07 | 4 remarksThose who know me well, know I’m never happy with my site. Ever. I suppose it’s like the carpenter whose house is in perpetual construction, or the landscaper who’s always adding to his/her yard. My friends tease me about this, because the moment I launch a design, I’m thinking about the next one.
It’s never long afterward that I come to a point where I don’t even want to blog, because I’m dissatisfied with the way my site looks. Sometimes even disgusted. Then all I can think about is a redesign. I used to wonder if it was just me, but after reading the guest post on Tara’s blog this morning about designing for yourself, I don’t feel so bad!
Unfortunately, this line of thinking is unhealthy and unproductive. When there’s client work to be done, children underfoot, errands to run, and the administrative functions of freelancing to handle, who has time to redesign every other month!?
The problem is, we always want to put the best of ourselves out there for the world to see, but as we learn and grow and become more proficient, we think critically of the designs we’ve already done. I’ve looked back on my work many times and thought “Ugh, what was I doing?”
So, knowing in the back of your mind that no one else is scrutinizing your site as much as you are… how do you fight the redesign bug? Do you think a designer’s site should be redesigned more often than most people would require? How often should that be?
Guilty! Instead of redesigning my design blog, I just go out and create new ones - yikes! I know exactly what you mean. I can’t wait for my weekend quiet time to tweak my blogs - I don’t let myself do it during the week as that is client time.
Sign us all up for the 12 step program…
Aug 30, 07 | 9:08 pmI understand how you feel Charity. Since it’s release in Feburary I have majorly tweaked one of my blogs about 3 times. Sometimes I felt as though I didn’t want to share my content until I could show off that new design as it would accomodate the new content well.
I soon realized that I had to post new content or else my site’s steady stream of content would come to a halt.
I was lucky though as I loved my original design and have just been perfecting it since. I’m so pleased with the design that I am extending the range out for some design work I have to do at Uni.
Aug 31, 07 | 12:47 amHi Charity
Thank for the link.
I am the opposite to you, Char and Daniel, my personal design site gets left until last (I m too embarassed to even link to it on my blog). This is probably because of my indecision of what to do with it, but also because theres always a paid job that gets put in front.
Aug 31, 07 | 2:00 amI only blog/design web pages as a hobby, but man, you’ve nailed the sentiment. I *just* went through my most recent bout of this in the last week (http://www.the-deblog.com/2007/08/the-deblog-rede.html). In fact, it was looking around at other sites to get ideas that brought me here. So now I’m in that golden period where I love my redesign and want to blog more. But will it last? It’s like a sickness: one day you look at your site and it bothers you, and you try not to let it get to you because you *know* what it will lead to. But the feeling grows and grows and now you don’t even want to look at it anymore, and then, well, it’s got to go. Problem is, it’s like painting one room in the house. Very often one site redesign isn’t enough….
Aug 31, 07 | 12:24 pm