Lessons Learned: A non-designer's attempt at a redesign
noahlitvin.posterous.com
noahlitvin.posterous.com
Novices generally don't appreciate this and just don't take enough time to produce good work.
I've been having an ongoing fight with a colleague who insists we should redo the design to a completely new theme before launch, with the rationale that it's "ten lines of CSS".
Part of the problem is that one of the qualities of good design is that it looks obvious and effortless. I have spent hours sometimes fine tuning micro-details to get just the right feel. The result of these hours of work is that it looks like it took less time rather than more - the longer I spend, the less time people assume it took :-)
(FWIW, I'm no designer, just a developer who has to put that hat on every now and then).
Applying a bunch of dribbble.com trends to a website is not design, nor will it do you any favours.
Here's a few examples: - The image. The first one communicates your service. The 2nd just freaks me out a little bit, what does it communicate? - I like how your original design was contained. It had a feeling of folders/filing which reminded me of files/libraries. Now you're using 960.gs it's all a bit scattered, particularly with the misaligned latin book and copy. -The only element that stands out to me on the 2nd design is the copy in the footer. This is useful to know and instantly communicates how effective your service might be.
Your first design could use some improvements in a number of area's, mainly the copy and UI. Yet you've focused the majority of your blogpost and redesign on aesthetics.
Unfortunately you've gone from a web service that looks as though it was put together by a developer, to a web service that looks like it was put together by a developer and a terrible designer.
Looking at other web app's designs is the wrong way to design. Going on dribbble will do you no favours. Look at your users and think, what will make their visit more enjoyable/desirable/effective etc etc.
This can work in some situations, but you should also be careful of over-using these accents. If you look at a site like amazon.com, for example, you'll see that they use solid colors and "flat" text more than gradients and drop shadows.
Pages also need white space to help organize content and avoid crowding.
So, if you go with gradients or drop-shadows (or effects in that realm) know that you're doing so at the expensive of a resource that adds readability and overall usability.
That's not an argument against using these things, just an argument against gratuitous application. (Consider that Amazon, for example, manages to get a good deal of content on their pages while still being fairly easy to grok.)
Correction: "Learning how to use Photoshop is a summer project of it's own".
I appreciate the linkbait and all, but saying you've developed sufficient enough design skills after one site redesign is like saying you should be an engineering manager because you developed your blog in Frontpage.
He's developed sufficient enough design skills to make his site look better than plain jane HTML. He's not claiming anything more.
There's nothing wrong with developing design skills over a summer -- I can develop Python skills over a summer without claiming that I'll be correcting Guido at the end of it.
This is hardly linkbait.
Looks like I don't have to build it anymore. =P
(My personal pain point was finding ordered lists of materials -- taking you from beginner to at least intermediate, produced by someone who knows what they're doing. Fingers crossed that BookShout will expand in that direction.)
I'm still new to it, but I've already worked with two designers, one psd conversion guy, and an audio engineer. My experience with all of them was positive enough that I plan to use the service again.